Suture / Lena Pozdnyakova
13 Nov 2023
The transgenerational
“ornament” of care:
working on displacement
and kinship through
collaborative work
with textile
Suture / Lena Pozdnyakova
13 Nov 2023
The
transgenerational
“ornament” of care:
working on
displacement
and kinship through
collaborative work
with textile
Abstract
This ongoing lifelike art project, incorporating research into shared community work with textile, maintenance, and service, attempts to reconsider the formal practice of ornament-making as procedural and conversation-driven, allowing for transgenerational trauma work and practices of care. With this, the project steps away from the visual cues of ornament-making as the primary "communicative language" in work with textiles. Instead, it attempts to depict procedural and relational work as the keystone of a tradition that can remain resilient to the shifting grounds of globalization, migration, and other inevitable transformations. The artistic research that addresses this question combines this written sketch and hands-on, collaborative work with my mother on the production of fragmented and composite textile elements. It is an artifact of our conversations on identity, kinship, and an urge to find a place in the world to call home. With reference to the Central-Asian notion of Umai, a deity that represents the qualities of womanhood and motherhood, the work stitches together fragments of family history, rumination on identity, and reflections on positioning within the historical and current socio-political paradigm.
Depictions of Umai. Sergey A. Yatsenko, “Some Observations on Depictions of Early Turkic Costume,” in New Research on Sacred Places in Central Asia: The Silk Road 11 (2013), 75. Sources mentioned in the article: 1. Gavrilova 1965, Pl. VI; 4. Shagalov and Kuznetsov 2006, p.308; 6. Tabaldiev 2012.
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Mother[land]
Separation.
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
W.S. Merwin (1962)
In No Milk, No Love, Asia Bazdyrieva points to the untold harm that the politics of extraction brought to the Ukrainian land. (Bazdyrieva, 2022) Asia's emphasis on violence as a form of biopolitical intervention sets forth her comparison of the fertile Ukrainian soil to a woman’s body. Not only does it give life, but it also sustains it through various acts of care and hence has to be maintained with respect.
In Central Asia, associations between land and womanhood are not unheard-of. Umai, a mythological deity in Tengriism, is considered a spiritual embodiment of Earth (Leeming, 2011: 181). She is one of the main entities that symbolizes the cultural identity of Central Asian women. Although the belief in Umai existed in the region for centuries, certain features associated with the fertility of the land and its endurance are revered in the image of the feminized body to this day. Culturally, legends about the spirit of Umai fulfilled the function of psychological support and moral education and were carried from generation to generation. Central Asian communities continue to value mutual support and dependence on the clan and its order, with the notion of the family and the wisdom contained within it closely connected to ancestral spirits.
This transfer of knowledge attributed to Umai was sustained through family traditions. Various rituals were most commonly cultivated in domesticity. It was within the confines of the home that younger generations of women learned about their role in society and the maintenance of nomadic life. The home, therefore, is a central theme in defining the relationship between womanhood, cultural identity and its material artifacts, and the surrounding natural and socio-political environment.
Based on architect Gottfried Semper's studies of vernacular architecture and domesticity, many indigenous cultures created dwellings that could be deconstructed into four fundamental components: an earthwork, the roof, the hearth, and the closing membrane. For Semper, the most important of these elements was the textile, associated with the woven envelope's enclosure. He linked textile elements with the drive for decoration that existed in various communities from the earliest times, or the "budding artistic instinct" concerned with ornamentation, rather than practical concerns (Semper, 1989: 103). For Semper, decorative art arose directly from civilization's need to connect with the environment and make sense of it. An ornament, in other words, has a close relationship with the logical structure of things.
Sketches that outline the relationship between adornment and cosmology. Aby Warburg, manuscript notes and sketches from Gottfried Semper’s 1856 essay on adornment (notes marked “Berlin, Fall 1890”), Warburg Institute Archive, Zettelkasten Aesthetik WIA, ZK 041/021149
Textiles (or textile walls for Semper) were understood not primarily as physical barriers but as "communicative" devices that convey cultural beliefs about the cosmos through the ornamented forms of material culture. Many of these forms, including architecture and craft, required a collective effort and durational procedural approaches in production. My interest falls into the aspect that accompanies the practices of cultural production– another drive – striving for kinship, community, and working in groups while producing artifacts of material culture. Following Semper's take on ornamentation as a reflection of the worldview, this written text and a hands-on exploration of the relational aspect in craftwork represents a fractured textile piece. By foregrounding relational work rather than aesthetic qualities, the object is deprived of a unified cultural or visual identity and is defined by procedural craft work, accompanied by dialogue. The role of the environment (domestic, cultural, political, ideological, or otherwise) continuously surfaced during the dialogue. The hierarchical structures that underline the existing cultural and socio-political environments and the role of the individual within them, in the processes of cultural production, prompted critical discussions about traditions, feminized work, and craft.
Semper’s view of the enclosure in its symbolic, cosmological, and practical nature is closely linked to the sense of ordering the world around us. Despite its reference to decorative art, the term order, in organizing the social and private sphere, carries a politically charged connotation. It is closely associated with the submission of the private towards the hierarchically dominant authority.
In the Central Asian context, the question of hierarchy includes domestic and public environments, with domesticity often seen as a feminized space without agency. This determines some of the most important factors under which the common culture in Central Asia is produced and the individuation and identification of the feminized body occur.
Screen capture. Papapetros, Spyros. “World Ornament: The legacy of Gottfried Semper’s 1856 lecture on adornment,” Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 57/58, University Chicago Press (Spring/Autumn 2010), p. 309. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25769985
Within the patriarchal social order of traditional communities in the region, women have carved out their own hierarchical power structure, embedded and determined by the rules of the home. Domestic space provided women with the framework for sustaining, contemplating, bonding, and building nuanced order.
According to research by Aksana Ismailbekova, the role of women in the Central Asian family had its system of social growth in status within cultural and social frames – its career ladder happens through domesticity (Ismailbekova, 2016: 266). Age and position in the family play a fundamental role in determining a woman’s status. Transference of power in the family happens with time and is predicated by endurance and patience. The transfer of power in the family happens naturally – unless interrupted by health issues or unexpected occurrences, by the elder member allowing the younger to step in. Loyalty to the family, hardworking skills, and endurance are the key qualities in gaining a position of respect within the domestic power structure. Patience and the passage of time – a natural process that does not require direct action – are at the heart of the conquest of a position of authority (Ismailbekova, 2016: 267).
The second important factor in considering the position and role of women in traditional societies that persists to this day is linked to forming groups based on gender, status, and labor division. Many types of domestic work in traditional communities rely on clan culture. Historically, many such chores were done in groups because they required more human resources. These are durational and resource-consuming occupations necessary to sustain the domestic order and strengthen family bonds. Numerous studies show that intergenerational relationships were at the core of cultural systems across many Central Asian communities. The family, in this context, becomes the center of social development, the source of reputation and social position (Kudaibergenova, 2018: 308). It takes on the responsibility that, in the Western context, was outsourced to the state. Many feminist thinkers, including Silvia Federici, have acknowledged the lack of opportunities for women to perform in public due to the connection between reproductive and productive labor conducted outside the public arena (Federici, 2012: 34). Domesticity is hence considered to be deprived of agency and therefore has been rendered unpaid. In the Central Asian context, dependence on the clan system, gendered work, and social reproduction as a primary virtue keep many women in marginalized social positions.
With the Soviet Regime imposing its ideology on top of the traditional value system, in Central Asia, with some exceptions, women have mostly remained influential within the same private sphere. The gendered politics of the Soviet Union and its collapse, in fact, only exacerbated the inequality and subjected women to more precarity. Sarah Ashwin (2000) notes that gender has always been a fundamental organizing principle in the Soviet system. Sheila Fitzpatrick specifies that f productivity was central to Soviet ideology: "increasing production and productivity….would necessarily bring abundance and raise the living standards for all.." (Fitzpatrick, 1999: 9) Women’s ideal roles encompassed jobs on production lines or services; communist party membership; social activity; keeping an exemplary household; and raising the generation of future socialists. Thrifty and savvy, women knew many secrets that aided in quickly and effectively managing numerous tasks. The community network allowed for these widely-known "hacks" to be shared and distributed among the households. Skills were often transferred from generation to generation, from neighbor to neighbor, and from one ethnic group to another.
As part of the lifelike project at Dom 36, elderly woman sells knitted objects and harvest from her garden.
Yelena Pozdnyakova, Lifelike art project: Practices of Care, fall 2021. Almaty, Kazakhstan. Photo by Damir Mukhametov.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the political arena became turbulent and unstable. Most families lost their lifelong savings, and bankrupted organizations left millions of people jobless. Almost overnight, state-controlled institutions were privatized to create a competition-driven market economy. Within this new paradigm, many women unable to adapt to the sudden changes were left to survive throughout the coming years with the skills gained in their households. They turned to the knowledge cultivated domestically to gain income and keep their social connections – they knitted and sold handmade goods, prepared preserves from their harvest, and sold them in public places. They often sat on the streets in groups, with neighbors selling things together. To this day, the knowledge cultivated in domestic space continues to be a source of social interaction and livelihood for many post-soviet women.
Transfer of knowledge, self-sufficiency and endurance revered in traditional environments have proven their value during changing paradigms as they allowed people to survive and stay resilient.
Lived experiences, family histories, and narrated depictions of the time were kept through the oral history that continues to accompany family ceremonies and domestic maintenance rituals. Many of these stories are difficult to speak about publicly; hence, they remain hidden behind the curtains of domestic space and remain within the family confines. For many Central Asian women, such intergenerational communication was and continues to be a common therapeutic outlet and healing work in adjusting to social and political changes or domestic abuse. The absence of institutional support or systematic change also prompted the transfer of the difficult experience to later generations. Gendered work, confined social roles, and obedience prescribed to feminized bodies by both traditional customs and Soviet ideologies, along with blind trust in the hierarchy and patience in response to political changes, became unacceptable to newer generations. Those who were meant to face empowerment and build a new reality now inherited dysfunctional and archaic systems of power and beliefs that were no longer suitable in the contemporary globalized and interconnected world.
2. Mother
“A rug inhabits an indeterminate space of its own, adrift between art and architecture, sight and touch, 2D and 3D, contemplation and use – an even within this last category, uneasily distant from the workaday absorbent mat and the room-unifying, noise-muffing carpet.
Perhaps its true place, in the imagination at least, is on the loom – in the continual process of emerging and unfurling, becoming. Arriving layer by layer from the future of its projected self, as meticulously notated (although always incompletely) on graph paper, back towards the present of its fully dimensional form.”
Alice Twemlow ( 2020: 103)
My mother was born and raised in a Tatar family according to traditional Tatar values. She married my father in the middle of the 1970s and took his family name – originally Sadykova, she became Pozdnyakova. She had two daughters, who do not speak Tatar, never attended Tatar school, nor were they exposed to the Tatar language in the family. They both wear Russian first names. I was given the name Yelena because my grandfather, Vladimir Pozdnyakov, wished for his sister's first name to continue.
Vladimir Pozdnyakov, my mother's in-law, also gave my mother the most precious gift, one that she treasures and speaks about to this day – trust. At the end of his life, he sat down with her and asked her to document his family history. My mother has done so. She also kept this document and later shared it with us.
Family history of Poznyakov’s family documented and archived by Saniya Pozdnyakova. Family archive. Image courtesy of the author.
Here is an excerpt from his story conveyed by my mother:
"In our country, every family that had suffered from the revolution had their own way of deciding whether or not to tell their children and grandchildren about it. In many families, this topic was too traumatic to touch.
In my mother-in-law's family, this theme was taboo. Most likely, this is because my father-in-law came from a family of hereditary nobility who were labelled “enemies of the state.”
Before I joined their family back in 1975, I had no idea about the family’s roots. Out of fear, my mother-in-law did not encourage her husband to speak about his family.
In the summer of 1976, when my elder daughter was born, my in-laws gave us a beautiful gift – a unique silver spoon and a fork with a monogram.
Silverware with monograms S and P referred to Stepan Narkissovich Poznyakov. Family relics, family archive. Image courtesy of the author.
I asked them what the monogram stood for, and while my father-in-law attempted to start the story, his wife abruptly stopped him.
Only years later, in the privacy of his home, Vladimir Petrovich Pozdnyakov told me his family story.
The silverware came from his family's side. It accompanied him to Kazakhstan as part of their tragic family history and an artifact of the “past” life that they have lost. The monogram on the silverware — an intertwined letter of S and P — referred to his grandfather's initials, hereditary nobility from the Kursk Province, Stepan Narkissovich Poznyakov.
During the 1917 Revolution, pogroms broke out, and all of their property was nationalized. In 1920, my in-law’s father was arrested and imprisoned for two years by the Reds. In 1921, after the Bolsheviks decided on a New Economic Policy, Peter was released and returned to work as a laborer on hire. In 1928 the NEP policy was shut down, and he was arrested again. The same year he died in prison.
His children and his wife have survived. Throughout the Soviet period, the family carried the stigma of the "class alien elements."
As a child, my father-in-law and his siblings had a chance to survive the Revolution and its consequences only due to help from their maids, who hid the family and looked after them. Three cooks and their nanny fed and accommodated them during the most tragic times of their lives. With their help, the family went on."
Top row: Pozdnyakov Vladimir Petrovich in different periods of his life. Lower row, left to right: Yelena and her husband, Vladimir’s Sisters: Asya and Yelena, Vladimir and his wife Adelaida. Family archive. Image courtesy of the author.
Nikolai Poznyakov depicted by Konstantin Somov, 1910. Somov, Konstantin, “
Konstantin Somov, Portrait of a dancer N.S. Poznyakov, 1910, in Somov Konstantin Andreevic, (Moscow: Isskystvo, 1973), 26.
Below, image on the left: Photograph of Pozdnyakov Alexey Vladimirovich. Family archive.Image courtesy of the author.
Portrait of Nikolay Poznyakov by Valentin Serov, 1908.
Valentin Serov, Portrait of N.S. Poznyakov, 1908, in Valentin Serov, (Leningrad: RSFSR Artist, 1989), 109.
My mother told me how my grandfather, Vladimir Pozdnyakov, who detested the Soviets, married a Communist and that all his life, their kitchen quarrels centred on this fundamental difference in outlook. My sister, who is ten years older than me and had seen the USSR collapse at a more conscious age, told me that my grandfather was immensely happy to see its end. My grandmother, mother, and father were unequivocally heartbroken —they had lost everything they had — ideals, hope, savings, and familiar ways to provide a livelihood for the family. For my grandfather, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a liberation, and he died two years after Kazakhstan gained independence.
During his life, several times he sat down to write his family history, but in fear of the state, my grandmother destroyed his drafts. My mother, the woman in the family to whom he entrusted his story, conveyed it to us.
Due to social and political changes shaking the country since the revolution, the stories of exile were overwritten with more recent histories of displacement. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and to this day, migration took on a global nature and exploded due to open borders and late capitalism. These changes added yet new layers to the psychologically damaging experiences of the people who suffered from oppressive regimes and forced relocations.
According to Marianne Hirsch, the postmemory effect occurs as an embodied experience in generations after the event and is shaped by the transfer of knowledge. Generational trauma unfolds, therefore, through reliving the difficult events on both collective and personal levels. Hirsch notes that "remembering" in generations after the traumatic events manifests in an experience formed by stories of those who come before and is often triggered by the surrounding environment associated with the history that frames the events. (Hirsch, 2012) Postmemory, as a symbolic transgenerational act of memory, thus, creates a direct affinity in various generations through a more personal and intimate relationship of the body in a collective social co-existence in processing the present and the past. (Hirsch, 2012)
Since childhood, I felt that my identity was fractured. The result of mixed ethnic roots, the story of displacement in the family, the awareness and sense of having a feminized body in a Central Asian country, the choice of artistic path, my political ignorance, apathy, and fear of the regime – all this drove me away from Central Asia. Today, being away from my Motherland, I experience another kind of displacement. I live a life where I find myself between several places – in a state of constant transition. An indicator of this deep identity crisis manifested through the realization that despite the privileges of studying and working abroad, over the course of the past fifteen years, I have been pulled from place to place. Awareness of being trapped in a loop of movement, in a zone of no identity with no sense of belonging, defines the agonizing experience caused by what I assume are the postmemory effects.
However, as it is often said, there are two sides to every coin. This distorted sense of identity also granted me a chance to live among many other cultures and discover numerous other displacement stories, accompanied by strivings for freedom, identity, and kinship. Engaging with the world this way allowed me to rethink the notion of Motherland. In an expanded locale, for me, the notion of Umai now extends the borders of one particular country and spans across the planet. It encompasses the whole range of ecosystems that sustain life and, as believed in Central Asia, when attended to, it feeds us, shelters us, and provides a home for us and generations to come.
3. [land]
“Here a form of biopolitical governance is constituted through the dividing line between human and inhuman, life and nonlife, agency and inertia.”
Asia Bazdyrieva (2022)
“The image of Umai (and her female counterpart as well, the woman from Suttuu-Bulak) accentuates narrow joined eyebrows and an oval face. Probably it is a female warrior depicted on the ladle from Kotskii Gorodok, with short plaits tucked under the collar of the caftan before battle, her clothes are no different than those of her male counterpart.” (Yatsenko, 2013: 75).
Kokpar match.
Alamy, Kokpar, photograph, in I’ll get my goat: Kazakhstan’s ancient sport for modern times, Guardian, August 15, 2017,https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/15/kokpar-kazakhstan-ancient-sport-for-modern-times
Central Asian deep respect for the role of the Umai forbids steppe dwellers from violating the Earth's surface. In some records, even harshly poking into the soil for no reason was often identified as violating Umai's body – the bearer of fruits was always revered and treated with the utmost respect. The soil – the land as part of the larger whole – was appreciated as it represented an ecosystem connected to all of the living and non-living constituents of the environment. The symbiosis that allowed for the Central Asian culture to emerge required, on the part of nomads, a substantial understanding of the changing environment, as well as deep respect towards the natural world. In nomadic living, animal bodies and plants, with effort and maintenance, were turned into utensils, food, clothing, and shelter. Striving for thoughtful cooperation, development of necessary skills, and inherent endurance — all qualities attributed to Central Asian women — were fundamental in establishing and maintaining a mutualistic co-existence with the surroundings. Through its oral tradition, rituals, and soft power based on knowledge and transfer of wisdom, domesticity and feminized work has the potential to influence change from within the community and put forth the dialogue emergent from the socially-engaged cultural field, as one of the outlets that addresses these issues collaboratively.
In the western institutional context, relational work, as a form of participatory art practice, gained prominence towards the end of the 20th century. With its roots in the 1960s, the importance of the maintenance of art as social, cultural, and ecological activism has by now established an important stage within the art field. The merging between life and art opens up a unique arena for cultural discussions and transformations. Through socially engaged projects, issues related to domestic work, traditional customs, and rituals receive critical responses and open the ground for public conversation that prompts awareness.
Empowered by these thoughts, I felt closer to my Motherland for some years. The notion of Umai as a symbol of respect and connectivity to the land and the role of feminized work as a relational practice allowed me to feel more at home in the world. My Central Asian upbringing brought the soft power to manifest in participatory projects, mutual aid initiatives, and socially engaged art practice. My mother’s teaching on sustainability, “the old way,” aided in incorporating sustainability at home. The recurring themes of womanhood, maintenance, and care became the defining line in my connection with Central Asia and the world.
The crack in kinship, however, exposed itself suddenly and unexpectedly. As a more urgent crisis overshadowed the global means of cooperation in the rapidly changing environment, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the project of attending to the needs of an expanded Umai shifted to the background, eclipsed by political destabilization and the resulting rapid militarization.
Damage caused to farming plots in Ukraine by shelling.
RFE/RL, A satellite image of Lyman, Ukraine, shows artillery craters in fields and destroyed buildings in late May, photograph, June 08, 2022. https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-farmers-risk-lives-global-food-crisis/31888556.html
Most importantly, though, since February 2022, the constant newsfeed filled with tremendous suffering, excruciating images of displaced and damaged bodies, and countless losses of human and non-human lives set forth the urgency of dialogue as a coping mechanism in witnessing the war and addressing its impact through various forms of care practices.
In No Milk, No Love, Asia Bazdyrieva emphasizes the violence on the Ukrainian land, compared to a feminized body, as a form of the biopolitical game for resources, the fruits of the land. To womanhood, motherhood, and human relations, Asia's postscript quotes a Ukrainian artist who, in a powerful and heartbreaking outline, defined Russia's attack on Kyiv in February 2022: “Somehow the war resembled childbirth to me: you can’t get out of the process once it begins, you start breathing in the rhythm of approaching and retreating sounds of rockets and planes, and you don’t know if you will survive at the end, you breathe, and you feel the warmth of other bodies, you see incredibly calm beings to whom you completely entrust your life and the lives of your loved ones. But war, unlike childbirth, will not bring new life, only death and nothing else. No milk, no love.” (Bazdyrieva, 2022)
In my family, this war has thrown my mother and me back to the unhealed wound of our family's past – displacement, war, and suffering from oppression. The events that unraveled from February 2022 opened my eyes to some aspects that I was oblivious to due to my political inertia and absence from the context. Growing polarization in the world and traces of an ongoing tension between the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, which have roots in the Cold War of the 20th century – have not been erased and blossomed in crisis. This asymmetrical relationship has framed development on political, economic, and cultural fronts, leaving generations of people traumatized by limitations, radical ideologies, and propaganda of generation in post-WWII, leaving them with nostalgia and fear of the regime. Obedience, patience, and endurance – often associated with feminized domestic space – now presented themselves differently. Habitual confinement within hierarchical structures at home and in the public domain is predicated on patronizing and oppressive power structures that we have inherited and continue to fuel. My mother's narrative in the face of the current crisis is filled with a deep sense of nostalgia, pain, blame, and regret.
The war brought back the urgency of working through the transgenerational events centered around the current recurring "New Cold War," polarization of the world, and views on such topics as struggles for freedom, striving for diversity, ecological crisis, and the value of human life. Our views on many of these have parted drastically and continue to come up among the main pitfalls in this project.
The realization that there is a crack in our kinship, however, led us to an attempt to find a safe space to communicate personal and collective views on reality. It brought up the importance of our well-being that, amid the distress of the current ecological and socio-political climate, could perhaps only be attended to through everyday tasks, the routine, our immediate duties, and maintenance work. And so we continued to maintain our lives in different countries and with different worldviews.
An afterword
The assumption that this project would bring my mother and me together regarding the past, present, and future and would allow for an intimate relational connection about the issues that concern us both at this very moment has yet to prove successful. Nevertheless, due to the practice of craft, maintenance, patience, and respect, we found the place of emotional connection, care, and compassion that allowed the project to happen.
Today, I continue learning about my impact on the environment. I practice composting, try to eat vegan, buy less packaged products, make art with found objects, and learn from my mother about the sustainable practices she gathered as a Central Asian woman. As we craft this project together, she continues to tell me stories about our family.
I do not intend to return to Central Asia, and the feeling of "patriotism" is unknown to me. These days, my heart aches when I read the news about the war and its impact on people, as well as its impact on ecology. I am also hurt to read about Kokpar, an archaic and violent game growing in popularity in Central Asia. During my weekends, I volunteer with refugee children from Ukraine in one of the local community centers in Berlin, and my mother supports my initiative to do so.
Together, my mother and I have crafted a speculative, in-part autobiographical work that investigates the associations between feminized work with textiles, focusing on a conversation – as a repeated "pattern" of care and working through difficult memories in an attempt to find fundamental notions of kinship and belonging.
For us, an ornament – a multi-functional communication device that carries complex information about the cultural history of a particular group and serves as a tool for self-identification in a society – is regarded as a relational event-like phenomenon. The process of material artifact’s emergence as an integral aspect of cultural development accommodates the transformative community-driven dialogue between cultures and generations. With this, the artistic research includes the production of crafted artifacts and conversational sessions that address care practices and transgenerational memory. Our understanding of ornament and textile work is less concerned with conveying "formal" or visual patterns that depict Central Asia's traditional art of ornamentation. Instead, it focuses on procedural ritualistic practices interpreted through the lens of one family's hierarchy, history, and its participants' outlook toward the future. This written text sets forth divergent references to the themes touched on during the production.
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