NAGASAKI TREES  - A BIOCHROMATIC STUDY

​

​​

Hibakujumoku / Colour / Material Continuity / Place

Within Travelling Plants, Nagasaki Trees - A Biochromatic Study investigates a fundamentally different relationship between plant, place and time.

​

The Hibakujumoku are trees that survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. Unlike the plants within Travelling Plants that have moved between geographical regions, these trees are significant precisely because they remained in place while the environment around them changed radically.

​

The project approaches the trees not solely through their symbolic or monumental significance, but as living material organisms continuing to grow within the contemporary city. The emphasis lies on material continuity and transformation: the persistence of living processes within a place marked by an extreme historical event. The trees are not approached anthropomorphically as human witnesses; their own material and biological continuity remains central.

​

Colour provides a way of approaching this continuity in the present. Plant-based colour is considered not simply as a representation of the tree, but as a material presence connected to the living organism, its environment and a particular moment in time.

​

Analogue photography creates another relation to the trees and their surroundings. Material presence and photographic observation can coexist without one functioning merely as an illustration of the other.

​

The project therefore moves between place, time, colour, material continuity and photographic image-making. Rather than attempting to reconstruct the past, it considers what can be encountered in these living organisms now, and how material, colour and photography can bring different temporalities into relation.