We Will Grow into Grass
This project explores the defensive line of Moscow near Zvenigorod — a territory where some of the most intense battles for the capital took place in December 1941, and where the frontline is still inscribed in the present-day landscape. It is a story about the memory of those who died and those who survived that dark period in the country’s history.
Today, the fields, ravines, and the banks of the Moscow River preserve traces of the war not as museum artifacts, but as part of a living environment. Trenches can still be seen, burial sites can still be found, and the land itself seems to hold the memory of what happened. For local residents, the memory of the Battle of Moscow is not abstract history, but a personal experience, passed down through stories, family archives, and everyday interaction with this place.
I am interested in how memory exists outside institutions — in the landscape, in personal experience, in individual efforts to preserve its markers. How it manifests not only through monuments, but through presence: in a tree planted in memory of the fallen, in reconstructed trenches, in the routes created by the residents themselves.
This space is both deeply meaningful and vulnerable. Different ways of relating to the land collide here — as a site of memory and as a resource. Local residents have been defending this territory from development for years. Within this ongoing conflict emerges the question of what makes a place significant, and how that significance can be sustained. This project is a story about memory that is not fixed, but requires continuous presence and care.
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