Guest | Karel Doing: Phytography

Phytography dives into the rich and varied world of plant chemistry. This collection of organic ​‘objets trouvés’ demonstrates how nature generates multiple creative solutions, each one structured intricately. Through the application of a simple chemical process, the selected leaves, petals and stems have imprinted their own images on the film’s emulsion. Shapes, colours and rhythms whirl across the screen drawing the viewer into a world beyond language and speech. The film taps into a realm of mutualism and generosity, readily available despite the environmental havoc caused by human greed and overconsumption.

A Patriot of These Woods is a film that is inspired by the novel The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. Calvino’s book tells the adventures of a boy who climbs up a tree to spend the rest of his life inhabiting an arboreal kingdom. The filmmaker casts himself in the role of the protagonist by applying his ​‘phytography’ technique. He dives into the vegetal world, undertaking his own journey into the trees around him using his body as a metaphorical soldier who defends the trees and plants that grow around him. An otherwise concealed world opens up, revealing the symbiotic relationship between humans and plants. A hybrid creature emerges, partially plant, partially human, their bodies merged, their thought processes entangled. These woods respect no borders.

Three miniature, illuminated, heliographic studies of plants, observed and imagined. Fragile leaves and very fine threads of fungus string together in Charlotte Pryce’s three plant studies. Plants and images of the plants, and their envisioned environments, are intertwined. The title is taken from an obscure genre of 17^th century painting: Forest Floor Paintings, which placed plants into a ​‘real’ environment as opposed to a vase.

The second in a series of ​“quilt films” that pay homage to the work of pioneering female artists, Athyrium filix-femina was created using Anna Atkins’ original cyanotype recipe, coating 35mm film and exposing each filmstrip to sun. The images are a combination of botanical photograms like Atkins’ images and found footage that tells the story of a young girl tormented by a gang of bullies that, weaved together, produce a feminist narrative that questions malecentrism within the history of the photographic arts and sciences.

Daphne Was a Torso Ending in Leaves is a playful and witty ode to a star of classical mythology: Daphne. Here, the beautiful nymph, who was metamorphosed into a tree to escape a stalking God, is celebrated as a heroine and master of her destiny. But Gallagher’s work, shot on 16mm, is above all a rich filmic experience, in which images and sound are meticulously intertwined to immerse the spectator in a universe of myth and legend. – Rebecca De Pas, IFFR

Looking at the foliage of trees, with its perpetually shimmering backlit leaves, the breeze stirred, like a mass of flickering signs, he felt the rustle amplify and decline as an unfamiliar language. A breach opens, the light passes through and the world unfolds.

Absences and translations motivate this experimental animation in an exploration of the methods and materials of reproduction and inscription. The inquiry is set within a framework of practical and critical human relationships with other-than-human-species elucidated by the theorist Donna Haraway.

A fragment from Haraway’s essay Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene is reworked here as a poetic manifesto. Enigmatic found-footage calls into question human violence over animal species. Plant life is both the subject matter of the images and assists the means of photographic reproduction.

The techniques used include in-camera animation, contact-prints and phytograms created by the exposure of 16mm film overlaid with plant material and dried for hours in direct sunlight.