In the series The Garden of Containment (2022), Yannic Joray draws seductive parallels between fiction and reality. The plans we see are based on the garden architecture of Anton Chekhov's seed merchants. Chekhov, a writer, doctor and eventually a gardener himself, used the garden as a recurring motif in his stories and as an "organic curtain" for his characters. Yannic mentions Chekhov's importance to his unlikely admirer George Kennan, the influential American Cold War diplomat: According to his biographer, Kennan was inspired by reading Chekhov to develop the idea of containing the Soviet Union. Kennan remarked that "we must be gardeners and not mechanics in our approach to world affairs". Since the Chekhovian garden surrounds its characters, defines their activities and binds their fate to it, the United States, as gardener-in-chief, "might in time get the Soviet Union to defeat itself."

photography: Julian Blum (above and below, left); Claude Barrault (below, center), Natalija Paunić (below, right)