The trouble with disorderly detail

2023
Installation comprised of aluminum light boxes with laser cut aluminum frames, audio, archival photographs on transparency film, passepartouts, model trees
Dimensions variable

Ventilation, hydration, and humidity systems regulate the false environment of the botanical garden. Within its glass-encased wrought-iron skeleton, the metallic, subdued hum of machines reveal the artifice that without such controls, tropical plants would not survive – for they have been transported to countries that are far too cold, too dark, too gray to support their life. Here, in the space of botanical garden, plants have been collected not only for their aesthetic value, but for profit.

Plants have sited and relational histories that predate colonization, with narratives that have become secondary to their value as commodities within capitalism. The uses of plants, for medicinal remedies, recipes, rituals, while known through oral history and embodied knowledge, have been superseded through their systematic accumulation and cataloguing.

Many of these plant species were extracted from other contexts and distributed through a vast network of botanical gardens in Europe that used the colonial project for the capture of plant life - for example, some of the species that found their way to Cameroon were through the so-called “exchange” of plants that took place between Jamaica and Kew Gardens in the U.K. and Cameroon and the Berlin Botanical Garden respectively. The archival photographs of the Limbe Botanical Garden in Cameroon (undated), were sourced from the Freie Universitaet Berlin, Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum. They are framed by the architecture of the Jamaican Pavilion at the Colonial and Indian exhibition in 1885. In doing so, the work looks to connect two seemingly disparate geographies that became entangled through the movement of plants and seeds.

Botanical Gardens functioned as sites of soft power - showcasing to European publics the bountiful nature of these newly “discovered” species that could be cataloged, displayed, and most importantly commodified. The site of the Berlin Botanical Garden, in particular, operated with the goal of expansion into and extraction from the German colonies through its collection of plants. Many of the tropical species showcased for local publics - commodities such as coffee, cocoa, palm, and teak - were used as a means to justify German imperialism into present-day Rwanda, Burundi, and parts of Tanzania and Mozambique (the former German East African colonies), Namibia (the former German South-West Africa), Togo and Cameroon. In Cameroon specifically, the Limbe Botanical Garden operated as an agricultural testing ground used to analyze and study the viability of economically lucrative plants. Much of this work was carried out by African botanists whose names and labour have been supplanted by German scientists who were credited with enriching the country through an accumulation and distribution of natural goods. The space of the botanical garden is intrinsically linked to the space of the plantation, where monocultures were later raised based on the research conducted within the garden.

The trouble with disorderly detail reflects on the violence of the botanical garden, as a site of knowledge, and how it is inextricably tied to capital, land, and property. The archival record always lies, we know this by now. Sound offers a mode of “critical fabulation”, in the words of Saidiya Hartman, that cannot reconcile the violence of the archive, but it offers us an opening: a method of troubling the colonial narrative, seeping through the fragments and transforming how we encounter it. Poetics pushes against paper as a form of refusal.