What Branches Grow (Fossils of Absence) is composed of fragments drawn from the artist’s digital archive– a continuously expanding collection devoted to documenting the rural landscape. The research traces the historical and social processes that have shaped, and continue to transform, the environment of the Cycladic islands in Greece. These processes leave behind visible and invisible traces, material and immaterial, that together form the islands’ rural heritage. Drawing on Jussi Parikka’s media theory, particularly his notions of “medianatures” and a “geology of media,” these traces are understood as fossils; imprints of human and nonhuman activity layered within the landscape.

The archive gathers over a hundred elements: plants, wells, terraces, dry-stone walls, and other structures connected to agricultural and pastoral life. Often unrecognized as heritage or monuments, these features are approached here as sites of memory and meaning, testimonies to everyday life, local knowledge, and the enduring imprint of human presence on the land. The title, taken from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, reflects on the layering of memory and time embedded within the landscape itself.