Our Grandmothers’ Gardens by Olga Grotova is based on the history of Soviet allotment gardens, which were small plots of land distributed amongst the families of factory workers to compensate for poor food supply in a country that was over-producing weapons. Beginning in the 1960s, Grotova’s great grandmother and grandmother tended an allotment garden for three decades, after their release from an all-female gulag camp for “enemies of the people”. These camps detained wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters of men executed during Stalinist repressions.
Our Grandmothers’ Gardens by Olga Grotova is based on the history of Soviet allotment gardens, which were small plots of land distributed amongst the families of factory workers to compensate for poor food supply in a country that was over-producing weapons. Beginning in the 1960s, Grotova’s great grandmother and grandmother tended an allotment garden for three decades, after their release from an all-female gulag camp for “enemies of the people”. These camps detained wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters of men executed during Stalinist repressions.
Our Grandmothers’ Gardens by Olga Grotova is based on the history of Soviet allotment gardens, which were small plots of land distributed amongst the families of factory workers to compensate for poor food supply in a country that was over-producing weapons. Beginning in the 1960s, Grotova’s great grandmother and grandmother tended an allotment garden for three decades, after their release from an all-female gulag camp for “enemies of the people”. These camps detained wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters of men executed during Stalinist repressions.
Olga Grotova is an artist and poet whose practice involves collecting and mapping stories of Soviet and Eastern-European women that have been erased from established historical narratives...