Catriona Gallagher: Plant-processing film at Sparoza

The project “Plant-processing film at Sparoza” seeks to develop alchemical moving images about the experimental water-wise garden of Sparoza, located near Paiania in Attica. The project spans filmmaking, horticulture, alternative photochemistry, and feminist retellings for ecological entanglement.

Sparoza, like other gardens, is a conceptually liminal place, which blurs the distinction between inside and outside, wildness and control; a container for the human-plant relations held within it. A garden is a place of conjunction between inside and outside, a human construction to mediate wildness and civility through the control and domination of more-than-human entities. At times, and particularly in new approaches informed by rewilding, decolonial practices, and eco-feminism, gardens can also be a site of collaboration with more-than-humans.

Since the 1960s, three generations of women have acted as custodians of Sparoza, all with roots outside of Greece, in the UK, Ireland, and the USA. The garden was run by a primarily outsider community who came to Greece and wanted to learn how to live more in harmony with the climatic, topographical, and cultural context of the Attica plain. I volunteered as a gardener at Sparoza from 2016 to 2020 and learned with and from its community of members, women, pensioners, locals, and people from all over the world to encourage gardening with a water-wise, anti-colonial perspective. This project therefore moves through questions of colonialism in migrations of people and plants whilst drawing from the energy of the custodians and volunteers of the garden, who proffer a less domineering and more collaborative existence with plants. Themes of control, dominance, and selection resonate alongside an otherwise quiet and meditative visual exploration of the garden.

The experimental element of the project aims to develop black & white negatives of people working in the garden, made out of the plant matter that they are weeding. Moving images of people working on hand tasks in the garden – weeding, potting, pruning, planting, and harvesting – will be developed from its so-called “weeds”, often invasive species like oxalis, that proliferate in autumn and spring. The weeding is filmed, and the weeds are gathered and boiled into a soup to develop the silver halide in the negatives.

I have been filming at Sparoza throughout the autumn, once a week on Thursday mornings with the volunteers. Each time, I shoot a single reel of 16mm black & white negative film, so around 2 minutes and 45 seconds of footage for each 2-3 hour gardening session. I’m using several different black & white films stocks, each of which will develop differently in the plant-based developers. Occasionally I shoot in color – images I won’t be able to develop by hand but will instead send to a lab. With these, I make sure I capture the shifting colors of the seasons: the dusty browns of autumn, the vibrant greens of winter, the multitude of floral hues in spring, and the yellows punctuated by reds and purples in summer. The sound recordings I’m collecting digitally are longer in length and include Lucie giving us volunteers instructions, voice memos about rainfall and weather conditions from the previous week, the hum of bees, the barking of dogs, the chirping of birds, the background chatter of women’s voices, the clinking of trowels in gravely soil, and the snipping and clipping of secateurs. The minimal amount of filmed footage will eventually be edited down further, depending on how much usable material I have gathered and how the developers react with the emulsion. There is a great risk of losing an entire roll of film if I get something wrong during development, no matter how many times I test it.

Each Thursday morning, we gather at Sparoza, the house on the hill outside Peania, having traveled from across Athens and Attica. We wait for the other volunteers to arrive, we exchange news, and head outside as a group, usually with the dogs leading the way, for Lucie to show us what we will be doing. We stop at the tool shed to pick up buckets and gloves, and sometimes secateurs, rakes, trowels, and saws. We head to the part of the garden that holds tasks for us to do – raking in the frygana, pruning on the hill, weeding in Derek’s garden, tidying the nursery, lighting a bonfire by the pools. Lucie gives us an overview of the day’s work, always offering options for both the more confident gardeners and those who are newer or prefer to keep things simple. She demonstrates to the group how to prune the shrubs back correctly, how to weed oxalis without leaving behind its bulbs, how to gather seeds, when to deadhead or cut back, and when to wait for cooler temperatures. Around every task and every plant, a web of associations, experiences, and knowledge is woven, its threads spoken a new with each telling.