What Becomes a Monster
Film, installation (2022–2026)

Total Flow
Group exhibition curated by Mindy Seu
June 3-10, 2026
New Museum, New York


The logic of our time is defined by acceleration: faster communication, faster extraction, faster circulation of goods, data, and capital. Labor no longer belongs exclusively to the workplace. It has become ambient and distributed across infrastructures, technologies, environments. Productivity increasingly functions as a condition of existence, sustained by systems whose operations remain largely invisible.

My film What Becomes a Monster examines how these same dynamics extend beyond human economies into ecological systems. Focusing on the history and contemporary presence of the giant hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum), the project traces the transformation of a plant once celebrated as an ornamental curiosity into a species framed as invasive, dangerous, and subject to eradication.

Introduced to Europe in the nineteenth century through networks of imperial exchange, giant hogweed spread across landscapes shaped by industrialization, war, migration, and land abandonment. Its proliferation reveals that ecosystems, like contemporary infrastructures, are not stable entities but dynamic fields of circulation, adaptation, and continuous transformation.

In my project, I’m drawing on field research, observational footage, archival materials, and conversations with biologists, anthropologists, social scientists and people cultivating alternative axioms of knowledge. My film asks how narratives of threat emerge and why some forms of life become designated as undesirable. More than treating invasion as a purely biological condition, my project approaches it as a cultural, political and emotional construct produced at the intersection of scientific knowledge, historical memory, media representation, and governance. What Becomes a Monster, set partly in the former Sudetenland of western Czechia, unfolds as an exploration of ecological and political complex entanglement. The landscape itself becomes an archive in which histories of displacement, extraction, control, and abandonment remain materially inscribed.

If contemporary systems operate through continuous flows of information, capital, and labor, giant hogweed offers another perspective on flow: the movement of species across borders, the circulation of fear, and the persistent capacity of life to exceed human attempts at classification and control.

The film was presented as part of TOTAL FLOW, group exhibition curated by Mindy Seu at the New Museum.