Individual residencies / Andorra
JOLENE MOK
From Wednesday, 2 April 2025 to Monday, 28 April 2025
Bio
Jolene Mok is an experimental artist who uses video art, analogue cinema and photography as her main creative mediums. She earned a master of fine arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University, after specialising in creative media at the Critical Intermedia Laboratory.
Her works have been exhibited around the world since 2006. A number of her digital creations have been shown in Finland, Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, China, Brazil, the US and Hong Kong. Since 2011, Mok has been travelling and engaging in residency programmes, with a particular interest in art residencies in remote locations. In 2012 she took part in a scientific expedition aboard a research vessel from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to explore the deep waters around Barbados, accompanying a group of marine biologists, while in 2013 she was invited to The Arctic Circle Residency on an archipelago at just 10 degrees latitude from the North Pole.
Project
Jolene Mok will develop a research project based on an ecological plant-based film development method, using the native seasonal flora and fungi of the residency's surroundings. In addition, she will create a series on the nature in La Massana by compiling visual documents and in-situ filming that captures subtle and organic changes in the natural landscape, a series that will become an alternative visuals collection for the town. The aim is to create an archive with the collected and processed elements to obtain the respective development solutions.
Nurtured by Nature in Andorra
My project here in Andorra is mainly to forage in nature for spring plants and to use them to processing films. Since my residency term is from 2nd to 28th April, it is such an ideal time for me to go out and about in Andorra to forage all of the blooming wild spring plants.
Foraging is a rather common practice & tradition in the European Region, but it is kind of a taboo in where I am from. Whenever ‘foraging’ as a subject matter is being brought up in Hong Kong, the mainstream media and general public would automatically associate a scenario in which all foraging activities are doomed to result in food poisoning, if not death. The demonisation of foraging in the Hong Kong context is not an exaggeration at all. I suppose it sounds pretty ridiculous to you, doesn’t it?
So, what I did during the four-week residency was to immerse myself in the natural surroundings of la Massana, conduct field research for my process based project to experiment with ecological film-development method through formulating 'plant-based developer' for black and white films.
It has been an extremely productive residency as I have completed 50 pieces of 4x5 sheet films and 19 rolls of 135 format film done working on photography. On the other hand, I have also got 2 rolls of black and white films - that is 36 different samples - films processed with local plants that I foraged, seasonal fruits/plants I bought from local supermarkets and kitchen waste with low-toxicity, ecological plant-based film developers.
