The invisible Garden
mixed media / paper lace, photography by artist and protagonists from different periods in Ukraine and abroad, hand made traditional fabric
Since ancient times, the art of gardening has been not only a deep metaphor, but also an action aimed at cultivating new life, when the human does not dominate in their relations with plants, but instead helps them come true, creating a friendly future ecosystem to souround them. Gardening is the art of care, respect, humility, painstaking work and hope.
In times of war, when you are detached from your native land, you don’t feel its strength under your feet and the world is spiraling insanely fast into the abyss, I choose - gardening. I am planting an real, albeit intangible, garden of Ukrainian plants – and the memories of forced migrants associated with them. Plants that Ukrainians met abroad, but they clearly remind them of their homeland and special moments from their past.
This project is the beginning of a bigger research project in the cultivation of such a "metaphysical garden”, an attempt at visualizing the strong invisible connections of individuals with the plants of their land, and not only with plants, but also with each other, the environment, their past and their present. The invisible garden of memories and plants seems rather fragile and ephemeral, but behind the layers of images, thoughts, feelings, smells and words, there is a powerful and invisible to the eye infinite rhizome (meaning the botanical term, later borrowed by philosophers) - a nonlinear network of roots that has no beginning and end, uniting in addition to roots of trees also a lot of living organisms, allowing plants to communicate over vast distances, to signal danger, transfer nutrients and...live.
Experiencing radical transformations in the new wartime reality after the full scale russian invasion of Ukraine, many Ukrainians are now going through times of internal restructuring, loneliness, revaluation of feelings, but the spiritual and mental rhizome of connections with land and nation, the kind of root network, despite all difficulty, continues to work, fill and give strength.
The project “Invisible Garden. Blooming plants and memories archive” shows this network and its human-nature connections not literally but hidden behind many layers, fragile moments, threads and nods from which our inner and outer world is woven.
Blending documentary data and research with artistic visualization of memory and experiences of forced migration, through the careful combination of photography, texts, materials and techniques, an image for each plant and memory appears and turns into a page from a documentary art archive. Through the metaphor of plants and gardening, we are facing the interweaving of culture, environment, history, people and nature, person and plant.
Olha Filonchuk is a visual artist, theatre stage, costume and puppet designer. Olga became a theater stage designer 13 years ago after her graduation from The Kyiv Academy of Decorative Arts and Design after 6 years of study in embroidery, costume design, and traditional Ukrainian art. She has worked with different theaters in Ukraine and abroad, and created more than 50 performances as a stage designer. After the large-scale russian invasion of Ukraine, Olha’s life completely changed. She moved to Germany fleeing the war, and the topics and forms of her work changed as well. She started to work more with the themes of war, migration, and cultural identification, the coexistance of human and nature, the connection with environment in the format of photo collages, documentary art books, and installations.
