research garden: a compendium of lost moments

In research garden: a compendium of lost moments, the experimental media artist Francisca Duran takes her analog film practice away from the screen and creates a multi-sensory installation centred on plant-based images. Meticulous and dreamy, the interactive exhibition includes wiry film flower sculptures sprouting from local soil, cascading film test strips on a large light table, dangling digital prints of enlarged film fragments on walls, a collection of optic objects for our viewing pleasure, and in the midst of it all, a 16mm film projector plays on loop her most recent piece, Compendium (2023). Compendium is the original work from which most of the plant-based images in the space are derived. Full of lush shapes and vivid hues, the film loop was handcrafted by Duran using the techniques of phytography and optical printing. Phytograms are created by the exposure of black and white celluloid or photo-paper overlaid with plant material and dried in daylight. With this technique, plants are both the subject of phytograms and also provide the necessary chemistry to produce them. As Duran remarks, “It is part science, part cooking, part magic.”

Mapping and cataloguing over two years of her work with the plantlife of Kensington Market in Tkaranto where Duran has lived for decades, she sees these phytograms as forging an inquiry into inscription, translation and power. Duran’s previous work has also been concerned with what she describes as “the practical and critical human relationships with other-than-human-species.” With her film It Matters What (2019), she created a poetic manifesto based on Donna Haraway’s essay “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene” using phytograms alongside in-camera animation, contact prints, text, voice and soundscape. Compendium, though, is soundless and wordless. The raw visuals bathe everything and everyone in the space and confront us in silence. Vibrant leaf-prints, fingerprints, scratches and tape marks on celluloid work with the various phytographic offspring to evoke human entanglements with nature. With every touch of the hand or lamplight, the phytograms are simultaneously illuminated and deteriorated. How are we to care for continual loss?

Duran’s exhibition and artistic practice raise questions about the meanings of iteration, archive, preservation and desire in a time of ecological crisis. Rather than providing clear answers, she offers an untidy compilation of analog and digital prints, maps, charts, and objects for handling, hearing, smelling and viewing so that we can experience a garden of loss as she has tended it. Haptic, optical, sensuous and philosophical, Research garden: a compendium of lost moments is an enticement to fumble in the dark by plantlight.