Urban Farm. Street Art Museum

Fragment from the book "Andy Wormwood. The Urban Farm". Translated into English by a neural network.

Guerrilla Gardening

Andy Polin is not local. I hope you understand that. Once in our region, he decided not to sit on my neck and, having no other way to get food, he set up a garden on the heating main. But the garden was destroyed, and he had no choice but to turn to me for help. Andy intended to continue cultivating the land and wanted to find a safe place for this.

In February 2016, I had no idea how it would all turn out when I called the "Street Art Museum". "No one will pay attention to Andy there" - that's what I thought and I was not mistaken. The museum is an institution that stores cultural heritage objects. The word "culture" was first mentioned in an ancient treatise on agriculture - that's what I knew at the time. But the question that occupied me at that time was: "Can we consider ourselves cultural, being detached from the land?"

In the "Street Art Museum", each new season is dedicated to a specific theme. When the events described took place, the theme was migration and illegal migrants, to which I certainly included Andy. The season opened in May with the exhibition "Across Borders / Through Restrictions".

I associated our appearance on this territory with my travel sketches. I am an artist, and my place is in the museum - this was a good cover. We settled on a wasteland, next to a scrap metal dump, a pile of earth, barrels of used engine oil and an ordinary garbage dump. I was promised an art critic and a text in "Sobaka.ru" magazine.

The art critic listened to the story you are already familiar with and did not want to meet with Andy. The guides bypassed us. However, when the harvest was ripe, a bucket of cucumbers managed to disperse into the hands of one of the excursion groups.

The technical director refused to perceive what was happening in the context of art. Perhaps he suspected something. Despite the fact that none of us insisted, a conversation ensued between us on this topic. During the conversation, it turned out that only a public burning of the greenhouse with the subsequent sprinkling of salt on the wasteland (a scenario that I myself suggested as a possible development of what was happening) could transfer my "work" to the plane of "real art".

The magazine refused to write anything, citing the lack of an information occasion, but included Andy in the TOP 50 outstanding people of St. Petersburg. Therefore, for the poster for the opening of our event, I used their cover. The museum administration made the entrance to the museum free for the first fifty people who came that day.

At the opening, guests applied moss graffiti to the walls, our team talked about what guerrilla gardening is and how it is connected with street art (which the museum did not know about before our arrival), then the "Performance from under the Ground" took place, during which a weed contacted those present via video link. The central event of the opening of the city farm was a concert on the bed - a live performance of musicians.

I will not be able to tell the story of everyone who joined Andy, I do not want to list everyone by name. We had fun, no one financed us in this or subsequent seasons, and we formed a real team. We did everything with our own hands, not with the hands of hired workers.

Our garden grew against the background of the "Street Art Manifesto", which has the following words: "I want to make street things like that." And we wanted to make them exactly the way we made them.

Andy Polin once said to me: "Culture is not consumed, culture is lived" - this happened in the morning, after we, at the end of the season, cut herbs all night by candlelight for our first herbarium. He said, climbing out through the ventilation window to the top of the greenhouse dome, while I was holding the ladder. Then, looking around the wasteland, Andy was silent for a long time, remembering how our small garden began: the first "grandmother's" beds, a cart with a dangling wheel, a watering hose that seemed to have to be pulled from the other end of the city, guards, with poorly concealed impatience waiting for the coloring of the first tomatoes (and not the walls by graffiti artists). The sphere greenhouse was covered with stretch film and resembled a giant cocoon. Andy Polin smiled, remembering the "spiders" who arranged this network. Alexander and Evgeny, two of my friends, without whom all this would not have been possible to imagine, stood leaning against an old white Volga. On the hood lay some book on plant growing: tightly tied, and already thick, it doubled in size from the beautiful specimens of plants that were interspersed with its pages. Like the pages of our summer.

A limited lifespan does not give us so many attempts to create the garden of our dreams. How many years and how many chances? Maybe five, or maybe thirty - it depends on when you connect to the processes taking place on your site. Andy was thinking about whether there would be someone in this city who would pick up what we started.

Creatures of his kind sprout like plants, until adults tear out the babies by the roots - this is how the process of growing up happens. This is reflected in the logo of the "Andy Polin City Farm".

Half a year after we left the museum, I was contacted to find out if the project could be considered completed, and how to deal with the greenhouse - I was pleasantly surprised. The greenhouse was left there as a gift, or rather, its frame. I don't know how they disposed of it later. I was also asked to write a text, but I am writing it years later, because at that time (as, indeed, now) I believed that texts should be written by those who want to, or those who assume such a professional responsibility.

Initially, we were supposed to be located not on the wasteland, but on the roof of the museum, but its technical condition did not allow this. But only from the roof you can see the whole city. Therefore, it was decided to continue moving in the desired direction. The hope of finding Oho did not leave us.