This is an oak tree numbered 00286, growing in Battersea Park.
Battersea Park was established around 1858. Perhaps it has stood here for more than 160 years. Within this 200-acre urban park, I noticed it—a single tree standing in the middle of a field of green.
I run in Battersea Park every week, and almost every time, I pass by it.
I want to become a tree.
To remain there for hundreds of years, growing upwards while rooting deeper into the earth. Seemingly still, yet always in motion.
I began to wonder about its point of view. Over more than a century, it must have witnessed countless things.
What was photographed was determined by the tree, while I became only the executor of the action. I placed twelve handmade pinhole cameras in a circle around it, allowing them to photograph from its perspective.
A pinhole camera requires a long exposure—around two hours. At the same time, I used another camera to record, from a third-person perspective, the process of installing the pinhole cameras. Afterwards, I remained there, waiting with the tree for two hours.
In the installation, I arranged the original photographic prints together with their archival sleeves around the exhibition space, allowing the space itself to become the tree—to become the inside of the tree.
The work does not attempt to document a tree. Instead, it is an attempt to momentarily let go of a human way of seeing. When the subject of vision shifts from the human to the tree, photography is no longer an act of control, but an imagining of another temporality, another way of being.
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