Mama Bear

Dispatch #13

A short one as I am in the final stretch here. Today I went for a walk with Martin (one of the bros of Žovinec Brothers) to a neighbourhood of socialist realist architecture. I felt like something different, as my obsession has been geared towards the industrial or the functional, it was time to parry a bit and strike out on a different path.

How about a quick primer on this architectural style, as it does, to some degree, influence what I saw and how I interpreted it. Basically, socialist realist architecture was the official architectural expression from the mid-1930s until the 1950s in the former Soviet Union and across the Eastern Bloc; its what erased constructivism from the books. Such building used monumentalism to embody the ideals of socialism, incorporating decorative, and symbolically charged, forms. Think: axial layouts, monumental scale, columns, porticos, sculptural relief (a lot), stone, marble, stucco. Murals, mosaics, slogans, all celebrating labour and work and agriculture, a melange of the heroism of industry and progress. Probably more of a propaganda style than anything, it did have a utopian vision mean to educate, inspire, motivate, and, most importantly, project power of the state.

Anyway, blah blah, I am not an architectural historian, but I did live in a region (for probably far too long) where such a style was prevalent everywhere.

But what has always struck me about such a style is the obsession with Mother and mother. You’ll see it everywhere. In fact, today’s journey brought me back to Chernobyl where I wandered for far too many months yet in utter bliss. It was there where I began to discover certain unconscious motifs, hidden themes that only announced themselves in the daily interaction of the subjects with my camera. In Chernobyl, one of these themes was Mothers and Sons.

Mothers and Sons in all their iterations

Mothers, even aged ones, sought to be photographed sitting close to their adult sons, in domestic scenes of proud companionability. There is no rift between made and maker. A mother transcends the material order. And, as I hoped my pictures from this work showed, Mother easily rises above even the most squalid circumstances. It is the frank declaration of her biological supremacy; I always imagined her saying: This is my child.

Mothers, Sons

And in Chernobyl, of course, is the unsaid echo that claims a different kind of Nature over the products of its fiery liaison with technology. That’s why I called my book Bastard Eden, because it is exactly that: a bastard Eden, born unsanctified. Here there was an invisible father, now ruined and impugned, irrelevant. Life goes on, as it must. Thank God for Mother.

So, mothers and socialist realism and socialist ideology all have a kind of matter-of-factness about the continued fertility of — at least in Chernobyl — the despoiled landscape which is both thrilling and terrible.

Anyway, wild digression.

We went to a neighbourhood that doesn’t really have a name, except for Soblahovská, which is just a name of one of the boundary streets, but there are mothers. Two, in particular. Although there are probably hundreds of mothers in this little complex of socialist realist apartment blocks built in the 1950s, these two are symbolic.

At one end of a small park, nestled in the bosom of a stone edifice beneath the protective canopy of elm trees, there is a family of bears. At the other end, past the children’s slides and swings, sandboxes and other playthings, there is a mother and her child. Mother Bear is nestling her cubs in her outstretched arms, keeping them back from the precipice of the crumbling concrete pool that lies before them. The cubs, surely, want to play; Mama Bear is ruining their fun. For decades the pool has been little more than a repository of dirt and shrubs, though once, long ago, children — probably our father’s age, if not older — swam there, while Mama Bear watched over them. Down the other side, there is no pool, but a mother is also nestling her child. Her form is rather crude, but the gesture of embrace is vivid.

The Bear family is by the sculptor František Gibala, the same artist behind the National Uprising Monument in the forest of Brezina. Today the bears are bare concrete, though in their first life they were painted white. Residents called them polar bears until another mother painted them pink. Nobody knows why. As for the mother and her child, no one knows who made it, or when.

Gibala carving a statue of a mother.

Both statues recall the socialist imagination, where the figure of Mother was more than a sentimental metaphor, but a social and civic infrastructure. Mother’s milk was electricity, harvest, ideology. Although she was always a heroic worker — bear or human, it doesn’t matter — her image was instrumentalized, a tool for the reproduction of ideology. Yet while the intention might have been nurturing as discipline, look at Mama Bear and her cubs: all that’s there is simple love, tenderness.