To My Daughter I WIll Say

Artist Olga Grotova’s film explores the tragic events of her own family history, which defined her interest in women’s personal practices of working the land. The artist looks at gardening and the cultivation of smallholdings as a means of female self‑expression and opposition to the repressions and totalitarian pressure.

In the 1930s thousands of foreigners who had come to the USSR to work became victims of the Great Terror. Like the female relatives of “traitors to the motherland” and “enemies of the people,” the wives, sisters, mothers, and children of foreigners were sent to ALZHIR (Akmolinsk Camp for the Wives of Traitors to the Motherland), a camp within the GULAG system in the Kazakh SSR (now the Republic of Kazakhstan), as relatives of “traitors to the Motherland” and “enemies of the people.” Among the prisoners of that camp were Klavdia and Marina, Grotova’s great‑grandmother and grandmother.

The corporeality of the video material and the embodiment by the camera, accented by the materiality of the 8 mm film used, is one of the main techniques employed by the artist to create a subtle language for the comprehension of history. Surviving a tragedy of historical proportions proves to be possible thanks to the practice of gardening (both personal and collective, based on mutual assistance), which supported the community of imprisoned women and remained with them for the rest of their lives. This corporeal embodiment of camera and narrator is an important motif for video essay practices, underpinning the complex structure of film and artistic research.

This work was created as part of the project The Friendship Garden for Garage Field Research.