What Does a Garden Know? examines the process of creating a sustainable permaculture farm through the lens and medium of animated documentary.

Looking from the very big - our human impact on the environment, all the way down to the very small microbes living in the soil, this film and paper are specifically interested in consciousness and the barriers we see between different types of life (plants, animals, microorganisms) and whether the complexity of their relationships can be replicated in an artificial setting.

Drawing inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, I am creating a frame by frame animated film in a mixed media style. The film makes use of different animation methods to tell a story through a collection of moments: spanning from the stop motion, under camera manipulation of objects and puppets, to hand drawn traditional 2D animation, rotoscoping video onto paper making use of inks from materials that have been cultivated from the landscape, and finally documentary video of the farm in development.

In choosing to use animation instead of more traditional documentary filmmaking techniques I am able to take advantage of the abstraction of images to translate an environmental political message into the poetic realm, making a message more universally accessible. The works are contextualized through the lenses of permaculture and sustainable agriculture, ecofeminism and post humanism, and animated documentary film criticism. The resulting work is a personal film about my own relationship to nature, and feeding a community.