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.