The following text is excerpted from my undergraduate senior thesis, completed in April 2025 in Film & Media Studies at Amherst College. View the installation gallery here or read my plant developer recipe.

Behind the old house in Schimatari is a magnificent mulberry tree. It’s lush, knotted, seeming to explode outwards like a verdant marquee. On the ground, insects scrounge and thrum in the heaps of overripe fruits. Sparrows gossip in the branches. From time to time a breath of wind interrupts the thick summer air to disarrange the leaves, agitating the bees and causing the birds to chitter; fat white mulberries patter down onto the dirt.

This tree has seen it all. It occurred to me then, balanced on the back stoop of the old house, that it could well have been 50 years since my father had eaten fruit from this tree as a young boy — and even longer since, at the age of 19, my Yia-Yia bid this tree goodbye as she left Greece to pursue an American education. I peered out at the mulberry tree through the lens of my Bolex, wondering what the rings of its trunk must have recorded in all that time: long rains, bitter droughts, smoke from wildfires raging on the higher mountains.

My project began there in the yard. I foraged mulberries, flowers, fronds, grasses, and herbs, leaving them to dry in the sun as I shot roll upon roll of 16 mm film — in gardens, in churches, in graveyards, in the decaying rooms of my Yia-Yia’s childhood home. I continued these explorations at home in Minnesota and on the shores of Lake Superior, and in the wildlife sanctuary of Amherst College. And with my footage and my foliage, I’ve involved myself in the darkroom creating developer solutions from scratch, eschewing industrial photochemicals in favor of the natural developing compounds contained in plants. By way of boiling and straining the botanical material, then adding readily available and benign ingredients, I’ve stewed these foraged plants into potent developers with which to process my 16 mm footage.