With Flowers




Performance and installation with projector in loop
16MM SCANNED TO DIGITAL FILE, COLOR, 4:3, SILENT, ES, 2022, 3’51"

“During the last week I’ve been drawing, mostly flowers, motivated by a curiosity which has little to do with either botany or aesthetics. I have been asking myself whether natural forms – a tree, a cloud, a river, a stone, a flower – can be looked at and perceived as messages. Messages – it goes without saying – which can never be verbalised, and are not particularly addressed to us. Is it possible to ‘read’ natural appearances as texts?

(...) It is a gestural exercise, whose aim is to respond to different rhythms and forms of energy, which I like to imagine as texts from a language that has not been given to us to read. Yet as I trace the text I physically identify with the thing I’m drawing and with the limitless, unknown mother tongue in which it is written.” - John Berger, Confabulations, Penguin, 2016, pp.136-137

With flowers began from the urge to feel the materials in our hands and the desire to make the practice of shooting closer to the act of gardening. The film is a constellation of reflections on flowers, composed of three interrelated events that took place in San Sebastian, where we collect, document and transform the images of real and virtual flowers, until their forms merge with the damaged emulsion of the hand-processed negative. In the end, only zeros and ones, zeros and ones, moulded in the matter.


Made with Amat Vallmajor, Borja Rodriguez, Humberto Vallejo, Martha Helga Lopez, Martin Alvarez, Maitane Ruiz, Olatz Arrieta Aguileta and Sandra Garcia Bueno.

This project was made possible with the support of Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola and GDA.

Mark