A Desire For Organic Order examines concepts of nativeness and belonging, filmed at the Herbarium and Centre for Middle Eastern Plants at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. These sites are embedded with histories of nationhood and identity, and provide points of departure to explore dispersal, belonging and otherness.

Voice is the film’s primary material. Drawing on botanical history and the new constitution in Iraq, the paranormal, and Burmese strategies of mind-flight, the narrative includes the last letter written by the artist’s grandfather, stationed in Burma in World War II, which reached home after word of his death.

Tracing botanical archive materials to contemporary links between Scotland and the Middle East, the film connects scientific evaluations of nativeness in the botanical realm to societal shifts in perceptions of self and other for the individual. A Desire For Organic Order exploring the underlying themes and experiences that bind voices from the past with the voices in our head and the spoken words in our present.

Exhibitions: Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai; Folkestone Triennial Fringe, UK; Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh; ArtScience Museum, Singapore; Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai; Cooper Gallery, Dundee; + screenings/events include: Glasgow School of Art; Göethe Institute, Glasgow; IMPULS Festival, Leipzig; CCA Glasgow; LUX Scotland.

above: A Desire For Organic Order, installation view, Florilegium at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2020.
Image credit: Tom Nolan.

“…A Desire for Organic Order, 2016, presents an overlapping of moving image genres of documentary, diary entry, observational camera, artists’ experimental film, slow cinema and scientific research field recording to trace out complex ideas of migration, nativeness, belonging, conservation, dispersal, mind-flight and the intimate communications – desires – entrusted to letter writing mapped over images of and rituals surrounding the Collection at the Botanic Gardens itself.” from a review of Florilegium, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (2020) by Alexander Hetherington.

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“…A Desire for Organic Order (2016), a mesmerising film of 55 minutes which explores the RBGE’s Herbarium, where species of preserved plants are kept for study and research. Although most visitors won’t have time watch the film from start to finish [due to social distancing regulations], it’s a fascinating piece, which shines a light on the strangeness of it all: the meticulously categorised, catalogued, classified plants, sitting in row upon row of filing cabinets and box files, the collection expanding over the centuries as new species are found and brought to the RBGE, their final resting place.
The violence surrounding these collections is examined at a distance, with the narrator’s voice dispassionately implying but never quite explaining what we know now, that far more care was given to these foreign plants than to the humans who lived alongside them…” from a review of Florilegium, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (2020) by Genevieve Fay.

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