Summary

Hidden (2023) is the latest iteration of my research and moving image project on the relationship between hidden disability and the companion-working plant. It marks a new trajectory in my practice that explores vegetal narratives concurrent in humans and plants, tracing colonial patterns of medicinal plant travel in the longer term.The film is based on my personal experience and life practice of managing fibromyalgia, a neurological condition that manifests in muscle and nerve pain all over the body by working closely with the plant Callisia Fragrans, while both of us experience displacement, encounter and adapt together to less than hospitable places of habitation.The work is both a marvel at the plant's medicinal properties and beauty, and a critique of the western scientific approaches favouring observation and empirical evidence, including the need to dissect and see in order to believe, over intuitive and embodied knowledges inherent in indigenous worldviews.