FANZINE COLLECTION
junio 26, 2025
MALI WEIL
julio 21, 2025ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCY
All images are courtesy of Emma Harris & Nicolà Lafrate
EMMA HARRIS
Residency periods: November 2024 - April 2025 & June 2025 . ARVAIA CSA. (Bologna)
Mentored by Kilowatt / Serra Madre.
ABOUT
Emma Harris is a visual anthropologist, filmmaker, and visual artist deeply engaged in the intersection of ethnography, cinematic poetry, and sustainable analog photographic techniques. Her work revolves around understanding human connections to landscapes through narratives, imaginations, and lived experiences. Currently, her research and artistic practice focus on multispecies relationships within regenerative agriculture, viewing soil as an active, collaborative ecosystem. Through her projects, she aims to cultivate a new sensorial aesthetic in agriculture that heightens sensitivity towards different life forms in our biosphere.
RESIDENCY
Artist Emma Harris undertook a multi-phase residency designed to foster situated artistic research, seasonal collaboration, and more-than-human co-creation with agricultural practitioners.
Structured around the temporal cycles of the land and rooted in the principles of feminist care and regenerative engagement, Harris’s residency unfolded over three working periods between November 2024 and June 2025. This phased structure supported an evolving research process that was multisensorial, ecological, and grounded in material transformation.
The first phase began in November 2024 with immersive fieldwork at ARVAIA CSA, an agroecological cooperative near Bologna. During this stage, Harris initiated a series of ethnographic interviews and sensory explorations focused on the lived experience of farming. Her research centered on generational knowledge transmission, embodied ecological imaginaries, and the evolving practices of regenerative agriculture within the cooperative. This period also included preliminary photographic experiments and the establishment of relationships with key members of the community.
She returned in mid-April and again in June 2025 to deepen this dialogue through continued collaboration with ARVAIA’s farmers, aligning her artistic practice with the rhythms of planting and harvesting. A specific plant species cultivated on the farm served both as an ethnobotanical subject and as a material co-creator, anchoring her multispecies investigations.
Throughout the residency, Harris employed sustainable, analog photographic methods—including phytography, anthotypes, and film burial in compost—as ways to invite microbial and vegetal activity into the production of images. Her process was shaped by references from feminist technoscience, posthuman philosophy, and ecological theory, including the works of Donna Haraway, Tim Ingold, and Heather Swanson. Influences also included scientific literature on soil microbiomes and regenerative agriculture, as well as texts on plant-based photography and embodied research practices.
By treating decay, time, and cohabitation as essential creative agents, Harris cultivated an art practice that was at once speculative and grounded, critical and caring. The residency culminated in a public event that brought together farmer testimonies, visual material shaped by soil and plants.
CAPACITY-BUILDING WORKSHOP
Image by Emmi Minkkinen
Tactile Images – Plant-Based Photography in Agricultural Landscapes
Date: June 26, 2025
Location: Arvaia CSA, Bologna, Italy
Workshop Format: Field-based analog photography workshop
On June 26, 2025, the agricultural cooperative ARVAIA CSA in Bologna hosted the workshop Tactile Images, led by artist Emma Harris as part of her residency.
This field-based session invited participants to explore high-biodiversity agroecosystems through plant-based analog photography, engaging directly with the soil, plants, and multispecies life of the cooperative’s farmland.
Combining theory and hands-on experimentation, the workshop focused on the creation of phytograms—photographic impressions produced through the direct contact of plants and photosensitive materials.
Participants began with a walk through the fields, guided by reflections on soil health, spontaneous plant ecologies, and the evolving imaginaries of regenerative agriculture.
Wild herbs and plants rich in reactive compounds were collected not as symbolic materials, but as active agents in the image-making process.
Using non-toxic, slow photographic methods—including DIY film developers made from gathered herbs, natural color tinting, and contact exposure—participants created phytograms shaped by time, temperature, humidity, and microbial presence. In this process, photography was reframed as a practice of radical attentiveness and co-creation, emphasizing collaboration over representation and embracing unpredictability over control.
The session concluded with a shared meal prepared using ingredients from the ARVAIA farm, offering a moment of conviviality rooted in the same soil that had shaped the day’s images.
