Women’s Cultivation Practices in Post-Socialist Rural Contexts

Artistic PhD Research / Ongoing since 2023

This doctoral research investigates the embodied and material knowledges of women's cultivation practices in post-socialist rural spaces. Through field research in the Komi Republic, community workshops, collaborative publishing, and site-specific installations, the project examines how gardening, foraging, and seed-saving practices sustain communities and preserve ancestral knowledge in the face of social and ecological change.

Research Questions: 

• How do women's cultivation practices in post-socialist rural spaces constitute forms of embodied knowledge that resist erasure?
• What can traditional practices of gardening, foraging, and seed-saving teach us about sustainable human-non-human relationships?
• How can artistic practice document, amplify, and participate in these knowledge systems without extracting from the communities that hold them?

Methodology: 

The research unfolds across multiple sites in the Komi Republic, each informing different methodological approaches:

Field research & participant observation — Living in villages, working alongside women in their gardens
Collaborative workshops — Co-creating glossaries, zines, and archives with community members
Site-specific installation — Creating public artworks that reflect local knowledge (see: Herbs and Winds)
Curatorial practice — Bringing rural knowledge into institutional spaces (see: Potato / Картупель)
Publication — Producing zines, articles, and artist books that circulate knowledge beyond the academy

Key Outputs for today: 

2024   Herbs and Winds — Window painting installation, Prokopyevka
2024   From the Place of Soils — Workshop and publication, Revolt Centre Syktyvkar
2024   Potato / Картупель — Zine and exhibition, Syktyvkar & Kozhmudor
2025   Ogorod: Collective Glossary — Riso-print zine
2025   From the Place of Soils — Journal article, Landing / Edge of the Glacier

Supervisors:  Prof. Dr. Asli Serbest & Åsa Sonjasdotter
Institutions: HfK Bremen & HDK Valand, Gothenburg