Chaumont sur Loire is one of the famous castles of the Loire, built by Diane de Poitiers, a tourist gem in the vicinity of Tours and Blois. It has a luxurious regular park - the reconstruction of a historical one, such as in Villandry, but for twenty-five years in a row, garden festivals have been held here - a cross between Archstoyanie and the festival of garden arts, so authentic for the Loire area. Both Shigeru Ban and Jean Michel Wilmott have noted here. One of the permanent installations in the old park of the castle is Nikolai Polissky's Roots of the Loire, made up of many tightly woven roots of the driftwood.
The organizers call the gardens created within the framework of the festival prototypes of the gardens of the future and report that in 25 years about seven hundred of them have already been realized. Annually, among hundreds of certified landscape architects and gardeners, an open international competition is held: this year the jury selected 26 projects that received grants for implementation, they began to build on April 21, and they plan to keep it until November 2. Each garden receives a small plot: all 26 participants are housed on the permanent festival grounds, with a total area of about 2 hectares, to the west of the old park, where the festival's permanent installations are located.
One of the gardens that received a grant for implementation in 2016 is the work of the team of Anton Kochurkin and Anna Andreeva, who for the first time perform together abroad. The authors call their project "Edible Garden", and also - "a nostalgic memory of tiny Soviet dachas on six hundred square meters." In a small space, there are metal skeletons that look like abandoned greenhouses, retro chairs of the sixties, enamel dishes with bouquets, postcards with photos of Kirill Glushchenko, boxes with seedlings and other simple and in some places deliberately beaten by time, objects of country life. The chairs were found in France, but upon closer inspection, they turned out to be of Czech production; and after the rain and repairs, the plaque of the always high-quality atmosphere of French retro is gone, and the chairs have become quite "country".
The garden is a reconstruction of a half-abandoned summer cottage, almost completely overgrown with field plants, although it retained interspersed vegetable beds, says Anna Andreeva. Field plants found in the vicinity of Nikola-Lenivets prevail. Music of "morning gymnastics" and radio call signs "Mayak" are playing in the garden - this is an installation by Vladislav Sorokin, which also "works" for the dacha atmosphere.
Some of the garden plants, however, are alive and therefore the garden is called "edible". The authors plan to grow tomatoes from seeds brought from the Tula region; this is our response to food sanctions, - says Anton Kochurkin in an interview for Le courrier de la Russie. Thus, the project combines two tendencies of modern garden and park art, inclined to experiment with both garden and meadow plants - in this case, in front of us, on a small plot, a “historical picture” of the struggle between one and the other is drawn, and the winners are “weeds ", or rather, the original representatives of the flora of the middle lane.
One of the topics that Anton Kochurkin considers important for the project is the contrast between the undeveloped Russian open spaces and the miniature six hundred square meters on which the Russian-Soviet man worked, and some still work without unbending their backs. Such uncultivated spaces, and such small dachas … As if their owners are to blame for this paradox. Now the wild background is taking over our gardens, but it is beautiful in its own way, the authors are sure.
The nostalgic note sounds familiar and trendy, quite Brodsky, if not even Tarkovian - the theme of dacha seclusion from Soviet reality has not gone anywhere, and worries us with childhood memories. It does not even contradict the theme of the festival - Jardins du siècle à venir, which Russian authors translate into the somewhat pompous but accurate "Gardens of the Coming Century". The consonance with the topic is explained somewhat paradoxically, but simply: who knows what awaits us in the future and when the skills of dacha "gardens of survival" will be needed - now there are food sanctions and import substitution, isn't it time to think about old-fashioned gardens on six hundred square meters?
In addition to the irony of Russian existence, with its permanent nostalgia as a sign of identity, the garden also falls into one of the latest global trends in the creation of farms and vegetable gardens in front gardens in urban areas. Europeans create mini-farms - without sonorous projects, quietly, with their own hands, while organizers of all kinds of exhibitions, meanwhile, are promoting their radical versions - one of the many examples is the exhibition of crate gardens from cramped Chinatowns at the Venice Biennale, which is rumored to be I liked Alexander Brodsky very much.
The hero of our time is a small person who settled in the world almost without intermediaries, or rather, not so much without them, but slowly adjusting the rules for himself. This is how we think that giving is the place of our escapism and a barely discernible internal opposition - I will throw everything and go to the country. But the dacha is called that because someone gave it, a trade union-socialist, and he continues to look at you and make plans. In one of Dmitry Bykov's novellas, a watering can starts from the dacha, taking the heroes away from the Moscow catastrophe to another planet. But what can you do? There is also a disaster, and he comes back. However, our dacha does not lose the taste of the cherry orchard that has been battered by time, and the project looks among the many neighboring landscape sketches - quite familiar, with its repeated, in many ways French, by the way, nostalgia.
