The winner of the inaugural Youth Photo Competition explores collaborating with fungus.
A few weeks ago the inaugural Youth Photo Competition, which is a collaboration between Canberra Region Community Services (CRCS) and PhotoAccess was won by photographer Remi Siciliano.
Siciliano's winning workThe Traces of Efforts to Collaborate with a Bandicoot, was a joint effort by herself and a bandicoot foraging in her garden. The Bandicoot dug up and scratched a piece darkroom paper resulting in an abstract image symbolising this special collaboration between the artist and the animal.
The images shared here are part of a currently untitled body of work. Read Siciliano's statement about these images below.
'My current body of work began with an uninvited intervention from a nonhuman in the form of fungus growing on very old, expired film inside a second-hand bulk film loader. The fungus wildly grew and sprawled across sections of film, obscuring and augmenting my images. What could be easily written off as a ruined material instead became an environment for growth, and by extension the start of an ecological practice of image-making. Since this initial unforeseen meeting with fungus, my practice has consisted of establishing experiments in the hopes of attracting and collaborating with other nonhuman forces and organisms to make images. These selected photos were all made from that old film, and are a constant anchor point for my project.'
Find more of Remi's work on her Instagram @remi.siciliano