The title of the film festival, seeing through a murky gaze, is suggestive of a body in which we can both see, and see through. This duality is descriptive of both water, and of the cloudy potion of seaweed film developer. A murky, turbid liquid that is an active body. 

In her essay Turbid Images and Bodies in The Field, Bridget Crone introduces “a watery and indeed optical term - that of ‘turbidity’ - to articulate a specific practice of fieldworking with a camera as a practice of immersion as much as picturing.” The Cambridge Dictionary defines turbid as “(of a liquid) not transparent because a lot of small pieces of matter are held in it”. This sets the tone to expand on this sense of turbidity as a body opaque with matter and sediment. But what is held within that body?

The process of developing analogue film in seaweed is one born from the corners of sustainable photography. Artists engaging with land and ecology turn to plants for their potent effects, and to open a conversation on representation and storytelling - to give plants agency to tell the story of their place. 

The rimurimu knowledge shared with the handmade darkroom by Love Rimurimu opened the possibility to create a developer recipe using an invasive species of seaweed such as Wakame. This has formed the opportunity for conservation in our artistic practices; to safely harvest a seaweed species that is overcrowding endemic rimurimu, and then use that life to bring photographs into the visible realm.

1 Crone, Bridget. “Turbid Images and Bodies in the Field”. Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical Practice for Art and Art-based Research. Bridget Crone, Sam Nightingale and Polly Stanton. Onomatopee, 2022.

2 Cambridge English Dictionary, online edition, s.v. “turbid”.

Chloe Mason and Belinda Whitta, water always has a body, 06:00, 2025. Super8 film developed in wakame seaweed harvested from Te Whanganui-a-Tara coastline