PHILIA
Hong Kong | In-situ Residency
Halaqat | Goethe-Institut Kairo
Taranto, Italy | Self-funded
Philia is an ongoing series of photographic prints made directly onto leaves, using nothing but sunlight and the leaf's own chlorophyll as a light-sensitive surface. The interest that would become Philia started in 2020, during a residency in Hong Kong, and has since travelled through Halaqat, a Goethe-Institut and Bozar programme linking Europe and the Arab world, with stops in Brussels, Belgium (2022) and Cairo, Egypt (2023), and later a self-funded research period in Taranto, Italy (2025).
Each print starts with a leaf, gathered locally wherever I'm working. I sandwich it between a printed transparency and a sheet of glass, held together in a printing frame, and leave it in direct sun. Over hours or days, the sunlight bleaches the chlorophyll unevenly, and an image slowly rises within the leaf itself. Because the picture is made from a living pigment rather than a fixed chemical one, it doesn't stay still: most prints keep fading after they're finished, and I've tested several fixing processes to hold a few of them in place, a small, ongoing negotiation between preserving an image and letting the material follow its own course.
Philia is an old Greek word for a certain kind of love: closeness, care, affection given and received between equals. That's close to what this work is actually about: care extended to the plant world, and maybe owed back by it. I started printing old maps of the territory and its surrounding islands onto leaves in Hong Kong, drawn to what happens when a document that claims to fix a place in place is laid onto something that won't hold still. I carried the same question into Cairo, printing old maps sourced from the Geographic Society of Egypt, several of them showing Palestine prominently. A map presents itself as fixed, yet borders are redrawn, contested and erased over time, often at real human cost to the people living inside and outside their lines. Laying that record onto a leaf, already fading on its own, held two kinds of impermanence side by side: the slow, natural one of the plant, and the imposed one of a border rewritten over the people who live within it. Care here isn't abstract; it's what a fixed line on paper so often fails to give the people it claims to hold.
More recently, I've turned the process toward portraits: eyes generated by AI from written personality descriptions. Two translations happen at once. A personality, someone's own account of who they are, gets turned by a machine into an eye, the part of a face we treat as a window onto interior life, a gaze, a self, produced by something that has none of those things. And that machine has never seen anything: it produces a statistically plausible guess assembled from everything it has absorbed, not anything it has witnessed. Printed onto a leaf, that non-seeing meets another kind of perception that isn't ours either. Plants mimic the shape and colour of other species, respond to light, touch and their neighbours, in ways we still don't fully understand. Neither the machine's eye nor the leaf's attention resembles human sight, and that is where philia, care reaching past the human, sits, in the gap between them.
Philia has developed across a number of residencies, programmes and exhibitions: a 2020 residency in Hong Kong; Halaqat, a Goethe-Institut and Bozar programme connecting Europe and the Arab world, which took the work to Brussels, Belgium (2022) and Cairo, Egypt (2023); and a self-funded research period in Taranto, Italy (2025).
︎︎︎ Chlorophyll prints
︎︎︎ Local plants
︎︎︎ UV from Sunlight
︎︎︎ Printing frames
Each print starts with a leaf, gathered locally wherever I'm working. I sandwich it between a printed transparency and a sheet of glass, held together in a printing frame, and leave it in direct sun. Over hours or days, the sunlight bleaches the chlorophyll unevenly, and an image slowly rises within the leaf itself. Because the picture is made from a living pigment rather than a fixed chemical one, it doesn't stay still: most prints keep fading after they're finished, and I've tested several fixing processes to hold a few of them in place, a small, ongoing negotiation between preserving an image and letting the material follow its own course.
Philia is an old Greek word for a certain kind of love: closeness, care, affection given and received between equals. That's close to what this work is actually about: care extended to the plant world, and maybe owed back by it. I started printing old maps of the territory and its surrounding islands onto leaves in Hong Kong, drawn to what happens when a document that claims to fix a place in place is laid onto something that won't hold still. I carried the same question into Cairo, printing old maps sourced from the Geographic Society of Egypt, several of them showing Palestine prominently. A map presents itself as fixed, yet borders are redrawn, contested and erased over time, often at real human cost to the people living inside and outside their lines. Laying that record onto a leaf, already fading on its own, held two kinds of impermanence side by side: the slow, natural one of the plant, and the imposed one of a border rewritten over the people who live within it. Care here isn't abstract; it's what a fixed line on paper so often fails to give the people it claims to hold.
More recently, I've turned the process toward portraits: eyes generated by AI from written personality descriptions. Two translations happen at once. A personality, someone's own account of who they are, gets turned by a machine into an eye, the part of a face we treat as a window onto interior life, a gaze, a self, produced by something that has none of those things. And that machine has never seen anything: it produces a statistically plausible guess assembled from everything it has absorbed, not anything it has witnessed. Printed onto a leaf, that non-seeing meets another kind of perception that isn't ours either. Plants mimic the shape and colour of other species, respond to light, touch and their neighbours, in ways we still don't fully understand. Neither the machine's eye nor the leaf's attention resembles human sight, and that is where philia, care reaching past the human, sits, in the gap between them.
Philia has developed across a number of residencies, programmes and exhibitions: a 2020 residency in Hong Kong; Halaqat, a Goethe-Institut and Bozar programme connecting Europe and the Arab world, which took the work to Brussels, Belgium (2022) and Cairo, Egypt (2023); and a self-funded research period in Taranto, Italy (2025).
︎︎︎ Chlorophyll prints
︎︎︎ Local plants
︎︎︎ UV from Sunlight
︎︎︎ Printing frames
