06/09-2022
recipes from the urban harvest
Gardening lies somewhere between leisure and labour. Krzak Collective was born out of this duality, coming together by establishing and nurturing a garden in Warsaw. For us, Leipzig stands as a true capital of urban gardening—a cradle of the movement. Our two-month residency at D21 began with an extensive field research in the Kleingärtenvereins (allotment garden associations), leading to everyday harvests from fruits growing along the way.
As visitors to collectively ownded yet organized as private spaces, we found our taste beyond the fences—on untended bushes, dry trees, and back roads. We shared this connection to the outskirts of the garden in a publication that represent most crucial fruits met during our walks and compiles recipes for urban harvest.
September plants from the margins of the city’s systematized productivity, the uncertain and precarious fruits of our work and leisure brought us a sense of commons within the public space. Pruning an apple tree became an act of caring. Maybe especially significant in a post-industrial landscape, overgrown with new life that could be sustained with a collective effort. The process of searching, noticing, tuning into wasteland topographies and character of specific ruderal plant communities made us experience each fruit through its own story. The fruits of urban harvest were then further transformed in different ways and served at the common table as a matter in constant process – fermented, baked, dried, infused, boiled or appearing as a color on a dyed tablecloth. They had hopefully passed further the taste of all precarious encounters which happened somewhere between meticulously cut boxwood and pavement cracks.
PART OF FOREWORD BY POLA SALICKA
(...) Shaping nature tokeep Kleingartens within their definition- cutting the hedge up to a determined
height, constructing miniature lands full of fairytale plastic creatures, establishing vegetable production in greenhouses and compost elevated beds or planting flowers around the house - mirrors the fantasies of work and leisure of the garden community and society at large.
The notions of how one needs to perform their gardening, which work should - or should not- be done, what do we share and what is separate, are exercised within the guidelines of the Kleingärtenverein and one's own sense of obedience and attachment. Since September is the harvest time, we started to figure out our share in the seasonal efforts and the way to keep our hands busy. Passing the enclaves of private wonderlands, wandering along the margins of an ordered structure, we were looking for holes and cracks in its boundaries.
The edges of Kleingarten areas often overlap with the industrial past of the city. Above the fences, on weedy corners and next to dusty roads, forgotten crops of the public reveal themselves. Fruit trees dotted with colors of apples, pears and mirabelles, messy bushes of elderberry, snowball, wild rose and blackber-ries. Mysterious sumac, and wild dogwood.
These uncultivated plants are generously inviting all those in need of juicy fruit. Feral spurts of nature reclaiming its agency - and thus not in need of labour - store our longing to leisure with no strings attached. Common plants, often seen as invasive species, scare with their insubordinate shape, yet offer sensible and digestible utility. In this way, our trust and curiosity brought us an unexpected urban harvest.
What you find is what you get. (...)
with Krzak Collective
at D21 Kunstraum, Leipzig
art residence - artistic research - dinner- recipes - publication