Tina Iris Chulo 

I talk to plants. They don’t always answer, but they don’t ghost me either. They hum in the wind, stretch toward the light, and whisper stories through their roots. I want to know what they know. Before we built concrete castles and called them progress, before we severed ourselves from the dirt and the damp, there was a time when humans and plants were allies. Now, we prune, poison, and pave over them. I wonder if they forgive us.

I make images. Cyanotypes stained in the sun. Photographs that hover between the seen and the sensed. I dig through archives like a witch searching for lost spells, stitching fragments into something that breathes again. Sometimes, I make collages. Like hybrids of the past and the future, the mythical and the mundane. I don’t believe in a single, clean narrative. I believe in echoes, layers, ghosts.

I filmed things. I have staged things. I have wandered the edges of cities, where nature seeps through the cracks of brutalist dreams, where vines claw back their stolen land. My work is about what happens when you really listen to the plants, the ghosts of places, and the parts of yourself that refuse to be domesticated.

Magic and science used to be the same thing. I think they still are. I want to collapse the distance between them, between humans and the non-human, between history and now. I want my work to be an offering. Or an apology.

I don’t know if the plants accept. But I keep listening.