This photo-installation is a call to contemplate on the interconnectedness of life, the living, and the lifelines.

On a vast field overlooking River Verzasca, viewers are invited to walk on a trail around ten anthotype prints anchored to the ground, mapping the shape of an endless knot with an indistinguishable beginning and end. The anthotypes (camera-less photographs) are made from Verzasca’s vegetation and are exposed by the banks of the river. The river-water as a developer under sunlight, on interacting with the floral emulsions and faunal visits onto the sheet, unfurls the valley’s elemental rhythms, textures, and signatures.

Verzasca—very much like the trans-Himalayas where I am based—holds an exceptional magnetism for its landscapes. But little enters the public consciousness about the unpronounced floral, faunal, and riverine ecologies which breathe life into the landscape. I try to embrace the ephemerality that camera-less photography offers to record these unexplored dimensions of the river; a format of photography which stands at odds with the very practice of freezing moments in time. For me, the impermanent chromatic qualities of plants reflect their sentience as nature’s silent stewards: filtering water, stabilising the soil, regulating climate, and providing nutrition, all while being biologically immobile, anchored to the earth.

Each anthotype in this installation is an unpremeditated record of the riparian ecosystem of Verzasca. The chemical vocabulary of native grasses, wildflowers, berries, garden foliage and invasive flora mutates with the river drift, wind and sunlight, becoming ephemeral splotches and streaks of plant colour on paper, rather than crystalline, picture-perfect images. Waddles and interventions by insects and birds add their own faint traces to the prints, forming tender portraits of the pulse of the river.

In the installation, each viewer becomes a participant in the making of the endless knot: a gentle intersection of trans-Himalayan culture with the Verzasca landscape and a visual composition that echoes the interconnected physiology of the natural world.