Conferences

Panel: Plant, Soil, Salt: In/Visibility in Ecocriticism and Experimental Practices

I will present a paper within the pre-constituted panel “Plant, Soil, Salt: In/Visibility in Ecocriticism and Experimental Practices” at NECS 2026. The panel explores in/visibility as a material and processual phenomenon in experimental cinema and media art, focusing on trace-generating practices such as handmade film, erosion, burial, and interspecies relations.

My presentation, “Embodiment as an Alchemical Process: Elemental Becoming in Cherry Kino’s Salt (2013)”, examines Salt (2013), an eight-minute, hand-processed photochemical film by Cherry Kino. The work forms part of the filmmaker’s two-piece Alchemy Series and focuses on salt, one of the tria prima (the three primes) in Paracelsian alchemy, where it signifies the Body as the combination of Earth and Water.

Shot on expired 16mm film, cut up, applied to clean film stock, and repeatedly rephotographed using an optical printer, Salt was made by the sea at Saltburn in North Yorkshire and follows three women playing in the water. Through a close engagement with and attunement to this cinematic work, I embark on an exploratory journey in which elemental philosophy, alchemy, and the concepts of presence and embodiment constitute the main pillars of analysis.

By emphasizing elemental processes, handmade techniques, and embodied modes of engagement, the presentation frames in/visibility as a dynamic interplay of appearance and disappearance, in which presence emerges through relational encounters between human bodies, elemental matter, and cinematic processes, thereby reconfiguring what can be seen, sensed, and known.

Alongside theoretical considerations, I also propose a playful experiment using Matthew Reason’s drawing methodology to approach cinema as embodied presence, embodiment as an alchemical process of becoming, and presence as something that emerges from and through relationality.