Plantaphilia

This is an experiment with analog films by Iria Suarez Martinez and Paula Turmina of Plantaphilia, exploring human relationships with the emotions of non-humans. As a series of individual videos, each one documents a different plant species, for which feelings and emotions are interpreted through human intuition in the form of colour, shape, and sound.

Our first piece displays a selection of sixteen plants that inhabit various parts of London, including Kew Gardens, London Fields and Victoria Park; as well as the countryside in South Brazil.

The film was shot using a Super 8 camera and hand-painted by us. The sound was a sonic response by sound designers, Kevin Poulton and Stuart Fischer. Their great experience creating sounds for horror movies and their vast knowledge on plants, made them the perfect partners to play around the question that we wanted to explore, how does it feel to be a plant?

To facilitate this interpretation, we created a barometer of feelings. This was a tool that helped to measure our individual depiction of the subtlety and intensity of each plant. After watching in silence all together with the videos, we shared our individual emotional responses to each of them. Through a common understanding, they were translated into the final work by the two designers, creating these particular sounds from sources such as vegetables and water, to more industrial soundscapes as radio waves. The combination of such sounds reflects on the current relationship we have with plants in the Anthropocene.

Encompassing the perspective of plant ontology, we allowed the encounter with plants to be an embodiment of intuition, which delivered a free interpretation of the visuals and sounds that we produced.

Biographies

Iria Suarez is a designer and design historian who works as a material specialist at A Small Studio, an architectural practice based in London. Born in Galicia (Spain), Iria moved to London after completing her BA in Fashion Design and worked for different design studios, galleries, and museums. Her passion for research led her to study an MA in the History of Design at the Royal College of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Iria is interested in the design of material culture for children and childhood as well as in experimenting with philosophical questions about health, plants, and wellbeing.

Paula Turmina (b. 1991 in South Brazil) is an artist and educator who lives and works in London. Paula completed BA (Hons) in Painting at Wimbledon College of Fine Arts in 2016 and is currently graduating in MA Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art. Her personal work explores mythology and magic realism in order to speculate new perspectives of
the future. Through painting, analog films, and sculpture, she creates expansive imaginary visuals drawn from her personal experience, ecological issues, and Latin American colonial past.

Paula’s research investigates how art-making operates in terms of philosophies concerning the decolonization of thought and the forming of a different relationship between humans and the animals and plants that inhabit the earth. Often combining different visual elements with animal characteristics, she takes into account a speculative practice that embraces the uncanny and dystopian connection between the past and the present in Latin America.