it was never meant to be said
Single-channel video, installation, mixed-media, 2024-2025
it was never meant to be said is an installation comprising a single-channel essay film and five vertical structures made of translucent corrugated plastic panels. The work confronts the contradictory nature of “care”, how intimate, domestic practices intertwine with the violence of colonial botany and plant displacement. Rather than an act of pure nurturing, care is examined as a mechanism of control and selection, questioning what is granted institutional visibility and what remains deliberately unseen. The film weaves together footage shot by the artist, recordings from her father’s orchid room, and archival materials. Tracing the non-linear temporality of plant life and peripheral memories, the narrative gradually expands into a fantastical register that imagines a sensory resonance between humans and plants.
In contrast to this imagined intimacy, the vertical structures serve as stark physical extensions of the inquiry. Evoking both orchid stakes and the transparent walls of a greenhouse, these hollow forms are filled solely with perlite. Devoid of soil or roots, they are reduced to an “empty gesture.” Standing as the material remnants of a contradictory care system, the installation leaves only the empty apparatus of care behind, ultimately asking what is granted visibility within these systems of control, and what is deliberately erased.
