Unearthing the Colonial Flower Archive

Hannan Jones and Theo Panagopoulos will host a workshop at the St Andrews Botanic Garden inspired by their process collaborating on "The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing" (2024). Prompted by Theo's recent discovery in Glasgow of a 1930s colonial film archive of Palestinian wild flowers and his collaboration with Hannan on reclaiming the archive during the ongoing genocide and ecocide in Gaza, the workshop invites participants to question the role of an archive connecting the geographical and historical contexts of St Andrews and Palestine.

We will explore how narratives of flowers and their relationship with people emerge through different forms of narrative-making and we will work directly with sound in unearthing the narrative of the existing Levantine flowers in the Botanic Garden.

The participants will watch together the recent award-winning film "The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing" directed by Greek-Palestinian filmmaker Theo Panagopoulos with sound design by Hannan Jones. After the film screening, the session will continue with a guided walk through the Botanic Garden and will culminate in a writing and recorded sound session using phones and geophones in response to, and in conversation with, the site and the garden's archives. Working in small groups, participants will create a sonic collage of the garden inspired by Deep Listening exercises.

Please bring an umbrella and your headphones if you have them!

Bios:

Hannan Jones delves into the realms of hybridity, rhythm, and psychogeography in response to cultural and social migration. Central to her practice are questions of continuity and rupture, explored through analogue mediums, and at the intersections of sound, sculpture, installation, and moving image. Jones' practice foregrounds personal and collective histories, departure points have drawn on Welsh and Algerian heritage, and considering how positionality continually affects how we relate to the past and see/become ourselves in the present.

Sonically, Jones' work emerges through experimental, improvisational practices utilising sampling, electronics, musique concrète, and analogue archives. She employs layered audio materials to create alternate possibilities, reclaim parallel histories, and reimagine the connections between them. These processes are inspired by pioneering figures such as Nicolas Collins, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and Éliane Radigue. In 2023, Jones received an Oram Award, a platform that elevates the work and voices of women and gender non-conforming artists innovating in sound, music, and related technology.

Notable sonic presentations have taken place at events including Festival Parallèle at GMeM - Centre national de création musicale, Marseille; Caerleon Amphitheatre with Artes Mundi and the National Roman Legion Museum; Arts Council Wales – Amgueddfa Cymru; SAVVY Contemporary with Archive Sites, Berlin; New Radicalisms, Rotterdam; Counterflows, Glasgow; Tate Lates, Tate Modern; Cafe OTO, London; REWIRE Festival, The Hague; and the Glasgow Film Festival at Tramway for This Is Now: Film and Video after Punk.

Theo Panagopoulos is a Greek-Lebanese-Palestinian filmmaker, film programmer, educator and PhD researcher based in Scotland. His creative and academic work explore themes of collective memory, displacement, fragmented identities and resistance often through anti-colonial, participatory and archival methodologies. His most recent film is a documentary essay called “The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing”, has screened in more than 200 festivals worldwide. It has won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2025, the Best Short Film at IDFA in 2024, was nominated for a BAFTA award in 2025, a European Film Award in 2026 as well as winning major awards in festivals such as Go Short, London Short Film Festival, Braziers, Salem, Interaction and others. It was also awarded Short of the Year 2025 by Short Film Conference. He is currently developing his first feature documentary film supported by BFI Doc Society, Screen Scotland and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) with the title Before Our Diaspora. He is completing a practice-as-research PhD at the University of West of Scotland which explores anti-colonial methodologies, film and performance as counternarrative to recently digitised film archives of 1930s Palestine.

Theo has also worked as a film programmer, having curated screenings for London Short Film Festival, Filmhouse Edinburgh’s Doc Screen, Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival and the SAFAR Film Festival. He has been selected as part of multiple programming labs and initiatives such as The Barbican Emerging Curators (2023), SAFAR Futures (2022) and Film Hub Scotland's New Promoter Scheme (2021) and has worked as a pre-selector for Sheffield Docfest (2026), Slamdance (2025) and Encounters Short Film Festival (2023).

The workshop will be led by Hannan Jones, Theo Panagopoulos, Viviane Saglier and Philippa Lovatt with support from the Department of Film Studies, Centre for Screen Cultures , Centre for Contemporary Arts at University of St Andrews and the University of St Andrews EDI fund.

You will receive confirmation of where to meet at the Botanic Garden after registering.

Access information about the Botanic Garden is available here: https://www.standrewsbotanic.org/visit/

For further information about access or if there is anything you would like to discuss to support your participation, please email Philippa Lovatt at [email protected]

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Host or Publisher Centre for Screen Cultures, University of St Andrews