Gardening is not about survival, it is about creatively enjoying our life. It refers to an ancient rural reflex in which we become owners and creators of a piece of land that demonstrates our tastes, values and social status. It represents an ideal compromise between life in the city and the countryside for those who live in an apartment, when through it we enter our own 3D reality. Especially when many of us are spending our workdays sitting, tapping our fingers and staring at a flat computer screen. It is not just a relic of socialist internal emigration, but a living pan-European phenomenon with a rich tradition.
David Macháč has been working on this topic since 2006 by mapping the community of gardeners around his native Opava as part of his bachelor thesis at the ITF in Opava. Subsequently he has expanded his scope to the entire Czech Republic and selected locations in Poland, Slovakia, Germany and France. In this exhibition, he presents a selection of photographs from the years 2017-2024, when at the same time a book Allotment Gardeners was published last year.
David has been laboriously building his visual sociological atlas, in which he maps gardeners and their gardens through the whole and partial environment with uniform lighting conditions and frontal view of the people. Their personal universe that we were allowed to peek into. Suddenly, after looking at just a few photographs, we realise that we are actually looking at the double portraits, where a given garden is a portrait of its owner. The one who has left behind his work, mortgage, news, unspoken compliments, swollen grievances and unventilated envy at the door of his flat, so that he can open the little garden gate and become a 1:1 scale modeller of his land. And that’s the magical thing about gardening in this volatile and unpredictable world.
– Veronika Marek Markovičová
The founder of the Central Slovak Gallery is the Banská Bystrica Self-Governing Region.