Instead of using film, artist prints photos on living plants

item of unknown content

–

Spanish artist Almudena Romero knew from a young age that she loved plants: “I must have been four or five years old – my grandmother would call and say: ‘What do you want for your birthday?’ And I would be like an olive tree.”

Now, with her inclusion in exhibitions in London (at the Saatchi Gallery) and Paris (Albert Khan Museum), she presents her unique plant-based art that leads the public to question their hyper-consumerism, while also showing that she is It is possible to create art in an ecological way.

In her four-part series called “The Pigment Change,” instead of developing photos on photo paper, she prints them directly onto plants.

“I just place a negative on top of the sheet and leave it in the sun, and then the image is recorded on the sheet,” said Romero. “But I also print on live plants using a digital projector, and the plant photosynthesizes with the light from the projector and records an image.”

In one chapter of this series, called “Family Album”, she scatters watercress seeds on a stretched canvas and lets them grow in the dark, before projecting a negative onto the watercress.

“The parts that receive more light produce chlorophyll, hence the dark green tones, and the parts that receive less light turn yellow, pale,” she said. “[It’s] exactly like in a photographic darkroom. But instead of having an enlarger, I have a projector, and my watercress screen is my photographic paper. This is how I cultivate photographs.”

The chlorophyll process adopted by Almudena was popularized in the 1990s by Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, who projected photographs onto grass using a negative and light emitted from a projector lamp. Supposedly, the British artists created the technique when they noticed random contours of a staircase molded into one of their grass installations.

Despite being an innovative process, it was not simple. It required a lot of space and preparation. Later, artist Binh Danh improved this method by using photosensitive plant materials, affixing a positive directly to a leaf and allowing sunlight to bleach the photo onto its surface.

Learning from plants

Romero, who grew up in Madrid, used to spend his holidays at his grandparents’ avocado farm in Valencia, in eastern Spain. Breathing fresh air, picking fruit, and learning about plants from her grandmother during her formative years instilled in her the eco-conscious values ​​she embraces today.

“When you get closer to nature, it becomes a very important thing in your life,” she said. “Plants are important to me, partly because of my family’s legacy and because, as photographic material, they are of impressive quality.”

But she admits her eco-friendly techniques wouldn’t work for every artist. “It’s a niche because it produces ephemeral pieces, so it’s much harder to be financially sustainable when your art is ephemeral, but I think it also depends on how you understand life and what you want to do with your practice,” she explained.

The 38-year-old is not alone in her love of plants. According to research published by consumer analytics platform CivicScience, more than 200 million Americans were houseplant owners in 2020. In recent years, the Millennial generation has embraced the “plant parents” craze, sharing photos and care tips on social media. But for Romero, plants are much more than something to take care of: they are beings from which we can learn.

“The plants were [around] they have been on the planet much longer than we have been and they have managed to do this without causing any extinctions,” she said.

Romero points to plants in deserts and arid environments that have developed strategies that limit reproduction, saying they allow him to better argue that it is not “unnatural behavior” to choose not to have children. “I’m someone who doesn’t want to have children because of climate change,” she explained. “I just don’t feel comfortable.”

In the series “The Pigment Change” she questions whether motherhood or fatherhood is something “beyond control” or a “matter of will”, reflecting on the selective reproduction strategies of plants and opening a broader reflection on procreation.

In 2020, she won the BMW Residency Award for the project and his work was exhibited at the renowned photography festival Rencontres d’Arlesin France.

However, it’s not just about what we can learn from plants. For the Spanish, we must also consider a non-anthropocentric ethics (a philosophical perspective that challenges the idea that humans are the most important beings, emphasizing the value of all living organisms and ecosystems), seeing other species as having their own agendas. and intentions.

The artist explained that she sees photoperiodism (the way plants respond and adapt to changes in light throughout the seasons) as a performance of plants. “Why do we tend to think that we only have these capabilities as human beings?” Romero said. “The problem is the perspective we have of thinking that we are very different until science proves otherwise.”

Studies have shown that plants may be more complex than we think. According to an article published in The Plant Journal, plants like Arabidopsis feel stressed when touchedwhich impedes its growth, while in 2019, another research group found that the beach primrose responds to the sound of pollinators.

Now, Romero is working on his next project, which is expected to be completed by June 2025. Commissioned by France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment, the size of the work is planned to be larger than a stadium.

“I am working in agriculture on what will be the largest photographic work ever produced. We are going to cultivate an image of 30 thousand square meters”, she said.

Romero is collaborating with scientist Nicolas Langlade, with the help of AI, to use genetically different wheats and grasses to obtain a color palette rich enough to produce a distinguishable image.

The work reflects on the human relationship with the earth and plants, our impact on the environment and our interdependence with nature. For Romero, this art-science project is like coming full circle. “It’s a combination of my family background because we’re going to farm it,” she said. “I love my passion for plant photography, so I’m really happy with it.”

“Metamorphosis” is on display at the Saatchi Gallery, London, until July 28th.

“Vivantes Nature” is on view at the Albert Khan Museum, in Paris, until December 31st.

For more news and newsletters from CNN, create an account at CNN.com