ABOUT THE SERIES

In my fridge door, a number and a variety of old color reversal films I received from photographer friends of older generations, started to accumulate. Because E-6 process is quite pricy, I never got around to shoot them, until one day, slide films were the only films I had left. I started a new series and decided to develop them as soon as I grow up and get rich.

I first started photographing wild plants and shrubs along the Croatian coastline, and continued to photograph urbanized, but overgrown flowerbeds of Ljubljana’s botanical garden. The latter inspired me to visit some of the other European botanical gardens, and this quest took me to Vienna, Zagreb, Prague and Berlin. I used up my stash of films and was, at the same time, lucky enough to be gifted a chance to develop them myself.

Upon reviewing the developed images I realized the plants on those photographs lack something – they lacked the “plantness”. With the photographic process I have robbed the nature of its natural, it contained nothing organic, it became sterile and not wild anymore. I needed to return what I have taken – I started adding the natural to the photographic medium. Series Žbunje / Shrubs consists of altering printed images by colorizing them with plant-based natural pigments; of stitching films with yucca-harvested threads; of films, which have disintegrated in the soil I have buried them in; and of adding different parts of plants to the images. I have always found the word žbunje, serbocroatian for bushes, quite funny. But at the same time, in its essence, the word contains a quality of wildness, harshness, which reminds me of nature itself. With my interventions I aimed to return some of this organic wildness to photographs of my, appropriated nature.

- Tilyen Mucik