2020-21

 

Ongoing project connected to ideas of colonial botany, plants as historical agents and the influence of science in shaping the roots of Western-culture’s relationship to nature.

Includes an installation of plants native to the exhibition venue, a series of botanical drawings of these plants and a video performance. The works have been presented in different locations across South America, featuring indigenous plants that bear the names of historical colonial figures as part of their scientific nomenclature. (i.e. the Achiote plant Bixa orellana, as named after conquistador Francisco de Orellana, or the Mutisia acuminata, as named after Celestimo Mutis). Through these intricacies, the project draws connections between forms of scientific cultural appropriation and the violence embedded in the many layers of these physical and symbolic mechanisms of domination.