Back to school
A school compound lying vacant for years in the Hakka village of Chuen Lung gets reinvented into a photography resource center and lab with a focus on community development. Chitralekha Basu reports.
Watercress solution
During her residency at Chuen Lung in March, Alice Cazenave stumbled onto a homegrown developing agent - organic watercress. "I had never tried it as a developing agent before. I was interested in it because watercress has a capacity to clean water," says Cazenave, who is part of the UK-based arts collective, The Sustainable Darkroom.
After the experiment proved successful, Cazenave ran a workshop to demonstrate the technique. "Participants enjoyed touring the watercress farm, seeing where it grows, and then transforming it into chemistry on site for our workshop."
In the course of her monthlong stay in Chuen Lung, Cazenave had found a new developing agent, "developed a new method of evaporating off waste chemistry to recover ingredients that could be reused and mixed into new chemistries" and networked with "universities, institutions and artists interested in ecologically minded photographic processes".
One of her most prized takeaways from the program, however, is the "opportunity to connect the history of Hong Kong and its ecologies with research at the forefront of sustainable photographic practice".
