Stills from in-progress film. 35mm photographs taken, developed, and scanned by Connie Zheng.
Since 2021, I have been taking 35mm photos of my garden every day, soaking the film in expired food from my refrigerator, and then developing and sequencing each frame by hand. Tucked into the interstitial spaces of these timelapses are my hand-drawn animations of speculative seed germinations, which I use to infuse an intimate sense of place with alienness. On one hand, this work is a personal archive of the passage of time, as the place I call home becomes increasingly surreal amidst worsening fire season and drought. It is also an exercise in playing with mythological and prosaic time and collapsing their distinctions: the archive of change is composed of many moments that were ordinary in their buildup. The score is made up of field recordings I took of three major rivers in northern California, whose watersheds literally feed my garden and sustain not just me, but the entire population of the region, and are rapidly being depleted.
Early versions of this moving-image sequence were screened at 41 Ross (San Francisco, CA) and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA). Sections were also printed and hand-bound into an editioned flipbook for Real Time and Space (Oakland, CA).
Updates forthcoming.