HauntedBontany
A HAUNTED BOTANY
A haunted botany considers the role that our material, affective, and embodied relationship to plants played in simultaneously expanding colonial control and extraction and incubating anticolonial desires and resistance. The project draws on the historical practice of drying plant specimens on sails in order to preserve them fortransport to the metropole. In each performance, I produce, to-scale, a sail that would have appeared on the HMS Endeavour, famous for its role in colonial botany. I treat the sail with cyanotype dye and then, in collaboration with local community members, the collective of performers and I create a large-scale cyanotype print using archival texts, images and objects related to a specific plant. Participants share stories about their personal relationship to the objects or practices related to the plant’s history. Finally, using the resulting cyanotype print as a gathering site, we organized a series of public programs including staged performances, lectures, and workshops in collaborations with local organizations. These programs explore how botany’s colonial legacies live on in the form of environmental and healthcare injustice, segregated urban development, food insecurity, the policing of migration, and more. It is my belief that through public and participatory performance, a haunted botany encourages personal, quotidian means of acknowledging, addressing, and also interrupting our own entanglements with oppressive systems. As a haunted botany accumulates sails, it will offer an ever-growing, collaborative repository for counter-colonial histories and imaginings of new futures.
