Still from Plantarians, 2017, HD video, colour, sound, 9 minutes 33 seconds
An English-style garden, a plot of earth in New York’s Central Park, a garden and a cemetery in Maastricht: Plantarians asks, ‘what does it mean to have a garden?’. Divided into episodes, the film studies the capacity of garden plants to respond to the particularities of their surroundings; at the same time, it tracks the lives of the contemporary men and women who cultivate, enjoy, eat, obsess over, and even grieve with and for these plants.
The piece invites audiences to witness the codependent existence of Earth’s living organisms and to reflect on how this interdependence can be characterised by both conflict and intimacy.
Special participants: Theo Tijssens, Jose Zinzun, Diana Robertson, Moira Coleman, Laura Simpson, Simon Brown, Mark Aerial Waller, Steve Brill and the plants
Directed, filmed and edited by Ellie Kyungran Heo
Translated by Domin Chong into Korean
Translated by Huibhaye van der Werf, Anne Vangronsveld and Kieren Jones into English
Second camera of The Hunger by Seungho Park
Translated by Domin Chong into Korean
Translated by Huibhaye van der Werf, Anne Vangronsveld and Kieren Jones into English
Second camera of The Hunger by Seungho Park
Developed during Hospitalfield Summer Residency 2017 (UK), Summer Lodge Residency 2018 at Nottingham Trent University (UK) and Jan van Eyck Academie Residency 2019-2020 (NL)
Supported by the Elephant Trust (UK) and Arts Council Korea (KR)
Plantarians: neighbours, 2018, research still, panoramic view
What makes for a good neighbour? And expanding on that question, what makes a good neighbour for a plant?
Still from Plantarians: barbers, 2018, HD 2 channel video, colour, sound, 3 minutes
Still from Plantarians: the hunger, 2020, HD video, colour, sound, 6 minutes 20 seconds
Still from Plantarians: escapee, 2020, HD video, colour, sound, 5 minutes
Still from Plantarians: the garden on your belly, 2020, HD video, colour, sound, 11 minutes 34 seconds
Plantarians, 2020, four-channel HD video installation views at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Netherlands
Exhibition Review, written by the biology educator Dawn Sanders, 2020
Plantarians, 2017-2020, video installation views at the Gallery 54, Gothenburg, Sweden