The baroque cult of curiosities among royals, nobles, and wealthy merchants.
By Dr. Joanna Page
Professor of Latin American Studies
Director of Studies in MML, Robinson College
Director of the Centre of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH)
University of Cambridge
Introduction
The baroque cult of curiosities in Europe crystallized in the form of prized collections, owned by royals, nobles, and wealthy merchants, of fabulous objects drawn from the furthest reaches of the known world. Like medieval collections, which often contained ecclesiastical treasures or objects with magical power, European cabinets of curiosities of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries boasted items of high monetary value, such as precious stones, as well as ones to which supernatural powers were commonly ascribed, such as unicorn horns, basilisks, and dragon’s blood. Each object was prized for its rarity: its uniqueness, the difficulty involved in bringing it back from far-off lands, the excellence of its craftsmanship.
Unlike the more systematic natural history collections that were to gain ground in the eighteenth century in Europe, cabinets of curiosities emphasized aberrations and transgressions over universal laws and taxonomies. Although the collections were far from unorganized, many of their exhibits were admired because of their resistance to classification. Natural specimens such as coral, which seemed to bridge the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms, held a particular fascination for collectors.1 Similarly, intricately crafted objects (such as carved ivory and wood) and mechanical devices (such as automata) were often included for their capacity to defy the boundaries between art and nature or life and machine. Cabinets of curiosities used techniques of juxtaposition and symmetry to create visual analogies that would provoke ontological questions about the natural world: what unites all living things, despite their immense diversity? What is the relationship between art and nature? Can nature be understood as creator as well as creation?
In their study of the marvels of European Wunderkammern, Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park investigate how such questions helped to transform the understanding of art and nature in early-seventeenth-century natural history and natural philosophy, “undermining the ancient ontology that opposed art and nature, with profound consequences for the early modern understanding of the natural order.”2 In this chapter, I explore the relationships staged between art and nature in the reworkings of cabinets of curiosities and early natural history collections developed by two Latin American artists: Pablo La Padula (Argentina) and Cristian Villavicencio (Ecuador-Spain). I examine what new (or old) ideas about the natural world emerge from their invocations of the aesthetic and conceptual design of early modern collections, and how their own works reconfigure the relationship between art, nature, and science in the twenty-first century. These new cabinets and collections deliver a critique of the relationships between colonialism, capitalist acquisition, and the commodification of nature, as well as the dominance in Western science since the Enlightenment of a certain kind of distanced, “objective” vision. They foster alternative encounters with the natural world that emphasize the affective, the embodied, and the subjective. These allow us, like Yuk Hui’s concept of “cosmotechnics,” to explore the different relationships between humans and technology that have emerged from different cosmologies, and thus to pluralize accounts of technological modernity.3
Cycles of Life in Pablo La Padula’s ‘gabinetes biológicos’
Pablo La Padula has created a series of installations for museums and art galleries that adopt many of the characteristics of the cabinets and collections founded in Europe in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In his gabinetes biológicos (biological cabinets), specimens drawn from the natural world—fossils, bones, shells, dried leaves—are interspersed with figures drawn on transparent sheets of glass and laboratory equipment, including flasks and specimen jars. The objects are arranged on large light tables and enclosed in simple display boxes (see Fig. 2.1). Their diversity is extremely engaging for gallery visitors, who pore over them, inspecting them from multiple angles. Like the owners of many early cabinets, La Padula is often present at exhibitions to talk about the objects and their origins.
The cabinets of curiosities that rose to prominence in Europe in the baroque era were highly personal collections, assembled on the whims of individual creators and drawing on their own experiences. In a similar way, La Padula’s gabinetes biológicos are intimately connected with his travels and his practices as a laboratory scientist. They include a fossil given to him by a friend, stones gathered on a trip away to which particular memories are attached, and old books from his childhood. These objects are not presented for their biological value but for the memories and emotions they evoke for the artist. These are of course opaque to the casual spectator. But as with the baroque cabinets, from these collections’ broader principles of selection and arrangement a particular understanding emerges of the natural world and the place of humans in it.
In its impressive abundance and heterogeneity, the European cabinet of curiosities seemed to stand in for the immense diversity of the world. It reinforced a classical and medieval conception of the prodigious variety of nature. It was not ordered systematically according to the logic of later natural history museums, with different genera or habitats enclosed in separate glass cases, which were often dedicated to specific geographical regions or stages in evolutionary development. It would be an error, however, to consider the cabinet as unstructured. Its multiple “frames, niches, boxes, drawers and cases” created a series of systems and hierarchies (see Fig. 2.2).4 Some of these were based on the four elements, while others represented the chain of being, displayed certain types together or established relationships between disparate objects on the basis of visual analogies. The setting and arrangement of objects inscribed them with additional meanings; as Patrick Mauriès suggests, cabinets and cases were not only intended to preserve items or to keep them secure, but to locate each object “in a vast network of meanings and correspondences.”5 The affinities established between objects from different regions of the world or from different natural kingdoms, or between the creativity of art and that of nature, revealed “the fundamental unity that lay beneath this welter of multiplicity.”6
The many different objects in La Padula’s gabinetes biológicos also invite viewers to speculate about the possible logic that might unite them. The artist explains that “El gabinete no va a pretender hacer una explicación del mundo. No pretende generar una narrativa lógica, pretende ser el envés de una narrativa científica. Pretende ser elocuente, poético” (the cabinet does not offer an explanation of the world. It does not purport to generate a logical narrative, it wants to be the reverse of a scientific narrative. It wants to be eloquent, poetic).7 As he intends, La Padula’s exhibitions allow viewers to create their own “adventure” within the universe laid out before them. But they also convey broad scientific principles which relate to the unity and diversity of the natural world. Visual resemblances point to forms or faculties that are shared across species: in Zoología fantástica (Fantastical Zoology, 2018), for example, an enlarged illustration of the veins and membranes that make up the architecture of a dragonfly’s wings (below, right) is drawn on a plaque placed below the skeleton of a dolphin, whose bone structure also allows it to soar into the air (see Fig. 2.3).8 The dolphin’s branching vertebrae and ribs reproduce the fanned pattern of an image created with smoke on paper (bottom left), which in turn resembles the form of the lobed leaves placed nearby.
Links between all of these objects are also suggested by the graphic representations of molecular structures which are drawn on glass sheets, erected vertically on the light tables. As we look through these transparent plaques to the objects laid out beyond them, the atoms and chemical bonds stretching out across them seem to unite them, binding together objects of natural and human design; the organic and the inorganic; animal, vegetable, and mineral (see Fig. 2.4). The insertion of illustrations made with candle smoke also points to carbon as the common denominator of life on the planet. Like early modern cabinets, then, Zoología fantástica stages the unity of nature and blurs the boundaries between nature, art, and technology. The visual correspondences that intrigued viewers of early cabinets are still present in La Padula’s work, but they replace mysterious alliances and occult agencies with the knowledge we now possess of carbon’s importance to life and the intimate relationship it creates between the organic and inorganic.
La Padula’s artistic explorations with smoke and photography are in part inspired by the great nineteenth-century scientist and inventor, Étienne-Jules Marey, who—like La Padula—was also a cardiovascular physiologist. As well as instruments to capture pulse and blood pressure, Marey invented “smoke machines” to capture the movement of air. Smoke became in this way “una imagen viviente de los procesos en el tiempo” (a living image of processes in time).9 For La Padula, the significance of smoke also lies in the trace it provides of the process of combustion through which energy is released, to be reconfigured into other material forms.10 It is a reminder of death, but also of the participation of almost all living things on Earth in the carbon cycle that sustains life. Our continued existence depends on this combustion, which knits us into the planet’s dynamic processes, in which all forms are broken down and remade:
Es en nuestro humo donde la materia, independientemente de su origen y lógica se unifica en un mismo plano de jerarquía. Es en este estado, si se quiere gaseoso y dinámico de la materia, donde se redime de sus divisiones circunstanciales, liberada del aprisionamiento de las formas.11
(It is in our smoke that matter, regardless of its origin or form, is united in a single hierarchical plane. It is in this state, gaseous and dynamic, if you will, in which matter frees itself from its provisional partitions, liberated from the imprisonment of form.)
Smoke, then, represents the biogeochemical cycle through which energy and matter are transformed into usable forms to support living organisms and ecosystems. For this reason, La Padula explains, a smoke image is placed next to the skeleton of the dolphin, which has, likewise, undergone a process of mineralization (in which the organic is broken down into mineral forms which are then available as nutrients to be taken up by plants).12
Early cabinet-creators were similarly keen to explore transformations in nature; petrifications were often given pride of place as they seemed to offer evidence of metamorphosis.13 The slow transformation of organisms into fossils suggested the possibility of a conversion from one kingdom (plant or animal) to another (mineral). In the twenty-first century, we understand such transformations not as singular or uncanny, but as part of a complex but ubiquitous cycle that binds all forms of matter together in delicately balanced ecosystems. We have ample additional evidence to support theories of the unity and dynamism of nature that were evoked in the visual correspondences of early cabinets of curiosities.
In many ways, however, the objects chosen by La Padula to symbolize such interconnections are very different from those assembled in early modern cabinets. Measured against the mercantile value of cabinets of curiosities, in which “wonders were also commodities: to be bartered, bought, sold, collected,”14 La Padula’s objects are consciously not chosen for their economic value, or even their value to scientific inquiry. If sixteenth- and seventeenth-century collectors chose precious articles that excelled in their rarity or beauty, La Padula brings together simple forms that are not, by themselves, prodigious or spectacular: stones, leaves, fragments of fossils, discarded biological material. He buys nothing for his gabinetes, creating them only with objects he has at home or in the lab, or finds on his travels.15He replaces a logic of exceptionality with one of the everyday, selecting objects that have been discarded, are obsolete, or exist only as by-products or incomplete remains.
If baroque cabinets of curiosities turned nature’s creativity into objects of artistic and commercial value, La Padula’s gabinetes invite us to question value itself. What is the value of an object, if it is merely composed of the recycled matter of another object? How could an object be considered “unique” in this context? In the natural world it is not the rarest element but that which is to be found in the greatest number of compounds—carbon, a waste product—that enables all life. In symbolic deference to the importance of residues and waste in the cycles that structure life on the planet, La Padula includes several objects in his exhibitions that represent by-products of his own scientific and artistic activities. Behind the dolphin’s remains are lab flasks holding the candle wax that had dropped when he made the smoke images; nearby is a microscope slide containing proteins that had been used in the process of writing a scientific paper.16 In nature, nothing goes to waste; here, similarly, La Padula puts to second use materials that might have been discarded according to the values of art or science, in which it is commonly the final result that is prized, and everything else is a means to an end. What is disposed of and overlooked is, of course, essential to the process of producing both art and science. As La Padula puts it, “Porque existe todo ese descarte, es posible la abstracción bella y simple del paper” (the existence of everything that is thrown away makes possible the simple, beautiful abstraction of the [scientific] paper).17
Zoología fantásticaand the other gabinetes biológicos created by La Padula therefore question how objects circulate and acquire valuein the different—but entangled—systems of knowledge, culture, and commerce. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century collections were vastly enriched by objects arriving from the Spanish and Portuguese empires, which offered alluring exotic crafts and unusual specimens. In their search for marvels to display, collectors travelled far afield; as Daston and Park observe, “Wonders tended to cluster at the margins rather than at the center of the known world.”18 Cabinets of curiosities were located at a crucial point of intersection in a burgeoning world system that would entwine natural history (and other disciplines) with capitalism, and with colonial practices of conquest and dispossession. Although collections bore witness to the wealth of individual collectors, Juan Pimentel argues that they should also be understood more broadly as “una interesante versión de la acumulación capitalista auspiciada por la ciencia moderna y su anhelo por ejecutar su imperio sobre la naturaleza” (an interesting version of capitalist accumulation backed by modern science and its desire to exercise its power over nature).19 La Padula’s collections adopt a very different logic that is not only non-commercial but decolonial, marking a clear difference with European acts of dispossession. While he removes objects himself from the places in which he finds them (national parks, beaches, fields), their small size and number, together with their commercial and scientific insignificance, only throws into relief the massive scale of acquisition programmes conducted by major museums and scientific institutions. His own practice of collecting, by contrast, is pursued entirely outside the capitalist system.
To some viewers, the act of removing stones or fossils from their natural environments to gallery spaces in the city may still constitute a form of extraction, however small-scale and symbolic. But La Padula’s cabinets fully espouse a conception of the natural world that is not, and should not be, corralled off from human intervention. Indeed, he denounces the contemporary use of ecology by the Global North to promote the conservation of natural resources (for exploitation by a future Europe). The idea of an “untouched” Nature is being imposed on indigenous communities in the Amazon, for example, in order to “save” natural resources in Latin America from the destruction they have already suffered in Europe.20 Far from promoting “Nature” as a pristine enclave that should be protected from human activity, La Padula’s gabinetes biológicos celebrate the artist’s personal and embodied encounter with a natural environment and the act of collecting and displaying objects, through which the natural immediately becomes cultural. He defends the right of the artist (unlike the scientist, whose studies are highly regulated by ethics committees and funding bodies) to develop a relationship with the natural world that is based on a direct intervention in it, guided only by an artistic imperative and a personal ethic.
This comparatively unmediated relationship does not conform to the representation of the natural world that is dominant in contemporary media or science museums. Bones in La Padula’s collections are displayed as fragments rather than reconstructed to form an image of a whole animal (as they might be in a natural history museum); neither is the animal world presented as a dramatic spectacle (as would be typical in a nature documentary). His bones are, instead, the objects of his encounters with real animals and their remains. Each gabinete is rooted in a specific geographic territory, with the majority of the objects collected from local sites. The objects take on the power of talismans, able to transport the artist back through time and space to the moment of encounter and discovery.21 As La Padula states, “Lo que yo quiero rescatar es que todos volvamos a poner en valor el encuentro con la naturaleza tal cual se nos presenta, que es más opaca, menos espectacular, es más sucia, es menos didáctica, es menos grandilocuente, generalmente” (what I want to revive is for us all to value an encounter with nature exactly as it presents itself to us, which is generally more opaque, less spectacular, dirtier, less didactic, less bombastic).22
La Padula’s gabinetes thus aim to return to nature something of the opacity and ambiguity of which it was stripped in Enlightenment collections, with their neatly classified display cases, laid out for educational benefit. His unlabelled collections inspire curiosity and speculation. Miniaturization in Baroque cabinets of curiosities invited a sense of play; in La Padula’s collections this is heightened by the inclusion of tiny human figures, rendered in smoke on glass plaques, and positioned in such a way that they appear to be exploring a garden of giant fossils and trees (see Fig. 2.5). If making a small-scale replica of the universe or its kingdoms, of the sort commonly presented in the cabinet of curiosities, offers “a degree of mastery or control,”23 in La Padula’s work the only object that has been miniaturized is, tellingly, the human figure. It is we who need to regain our sense of play, immersed in the diversity of the natural world. The theme of natura ludens (nature at play) that inspired many baroque cabinets of curiosities becomes here one of homo ludens instead.
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cabinets often staged a kind of rivalry between art and nature, in which each emulated the other in its creativity.24 Rather than simply reflecting the splendour of the divine creator, nature was personified in these wondrous objects “as an elevated kind of artisan”; like the goldsmith and the painter of miniatures, Daston and Park argue, she was “freed from the demands of utility.”25 If the Aristotelian tradition found beauty in the economy of nature—“nature does nothing in vain”—“the wonders of the cabinets gloried in superfluity, careless of function and extravagant in expenditure of labor and materials.”26 Although the natural world in La Padula’s work is still very much a space of creative transformations, a more sombre, post-anthropocentric perspective accords a greater value to “utility” and the careful use of resources than in earlier periods. A baroque aesthetic of excess is replaced with an ethic of minimalism.
Consciously diverging from the kind of high-tech science and art collaborations that are being exhibited at museums worldwide, La Padula attempts to create an art that is as “paleolithic” as possible: “un arte que tenga el impacto ambiental del hombre de las cavernas” (an art with the environmental impact of a caveman).27 The simple elegance of the natural forms he displays in his cabinets is matched by his own minimal use of resources. Three-dimensional effects are not created with video technologies but with the straightforward projection of light through drawings on transparent sheets of glass. If art imitates nature here, it is a nature that is sober and rather economical. The effect is anything but austere, however, as the poetic play of light and perspective lends a magical quality to the plainest objects.
As part of their critique of the commodification of the natural world, La Padula’s gabinetes reveal a crucial disjuncture between the circulation of matter in the natural world and the circulation of commodities in a commercial system. Capitalist circulation, which creates unrecyclable waste and reservoirs of accumulation, is of a different order to the kind of circulation that characterizes the natural world. Humans cannot remove themselves from this kind of circulation, and indeed any attempt to do so results in a conservationism that reinforces a separation between the human and the nonhuman. La Padula insists, “el ser humano es un sistema biológicamente abierto, que vive de incorporar y devolver cosas y transformar el medioambiente” (the human being is an open biological system, which lives by incorporating things and giving them back, and by transforming the environment).28 The question raised by his gabinetes biológicos is not whether such exchanges should take place—they are inevitable—but what kind of encounters and transformations will characterize our relationship with the natural world, and what values they will reflect or generate.
Cristian Villavicencio: Cosmotechnics and the Politics of Objectivity
In addition to natural wonders and works of art, cabinets of curiosities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often displayed technical devices, such as microscopes and telescopes, which at the time were radically transforming perceptions of the natural world. Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris argue that the growing reliance on the mediation of lenses, screens and other artificial instruments from the late sixteenth century onwards creates a powerful tension that is “crucial” for an understanding of early modern science.29 As “a corollary of Baroque fascination with the particular, the detailed and the sensual,” a commitment to empiricism—the demand that knowledge be based on experience gained through the senses—is foundational to this new science. At the same time, the increasing use of instruments leads to a rejection of the immediacy of the senses and the recognition that “all empirical knowledge is fundamentally mediated; that nature could only be approached by art.”30
Cristian Villavicencio’s installations display fossils, beetles, bacteria, and plants together with some of the visual technologies that have facilitated our study of other organisms, such as microscopes, cameras, and projectors. His works stage an exploration of the relationship between embodied perception and technology that return, in part, to the “baroque paradox” outlined by Gal and Chen-Morris. Villavicencio alerts us to the significant role played by visual technologies in our encounter with, and understanding of, the world. But he also traces new possible roles for such technologies that diverge from, and challenge, the “objective” view accorded by scientific instruments. In Villavicencio’s highly mediated collections we can detect a kind of counter-history of Western science and technology, in which the technological mediation of perception does not bolster Enlightenment aims of objectivity and universality but instead provides new opportunities for intimate encounters with the natural world. The remediations of archives and instruments that are at the heart of much of Villavicencio’s artistic practice are made even more potent by his choice of exhibition spaces. He often exhibits his work either in spaces dedicated to contemporary art—bringing scientific images and objects into a context in which questions of perception and subjectivity are naturally at the forefront—or in spaces associated with university faculties and institutes, where they may take part in broader debates concerning knowledge production and the relationship between art and science or technology.
Selecciones (Selections, 2019) was exhibited in one such venue, Arte Actual FLACSO, which is linked to the Departamento de Antropología, Historia y Humanidades at the Quito site of the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, a renowned Latin American research institution. It is a space dedicated to contemporary art with a transdisciplinary focus, and it promotes art as a form of knowledge production with the potential to transform people and societies.31 In Selecciones, a wooden table is set out with objects borrowed from the Departamento de Biología of the Escuela Politécnica Nacional in Ecuador: a colourful array of butterfly and beetle boxes, the skeletons of a porcupine and a sloth, a snake coiled in a large specimen jar, and a 3D-printed model of a fossil (see Fig. 2.6).32
While many of these items belong to an archive founded in the nineteenth century and catalogued according to the Linnaean system, their selection, heterogeneous combination and theatricalization in Villavicencio’s exhibitions is much more reminiscent of earlier cabinets of curiosities. Several of the specimens on the table are placed on rotating disks and simultaneously filmed by tiny cameras; these moving images are projected onto a screen nearby (see Fig. 2.7). Many of the videos are shot in extreme close-up. Displaced from the scientific archive and released from the classifying gaze of a palaeontologist or a biologist, these specimens take on new aspects and meanings. Their textures, colours, and patterns come to the fore, exuding a vibrancy that is maintained in death. Their display speaks of their availability, in death, to our gaze; on the other hand, the unfamiliar and unsettling perspectives of the video projections ensure that they do not become an object of our visual domination.
Villavicencio had worked with the archives held at the Escuela Politécnica Nacional previously. Founded in 1869 as Ecuador’s first research centre, the Escuela was initially overseen by German Jesuits; its natural history collections bear the imprint of that European influence in their organization, and for Villavicencio, they represent the nation’s fervent embrace of Western positivism.33 He filmed boxes of fossils and insects that had been arranged for him by one of Escuela’s researchers. The video, entitled Especímenes (Specimens) and shown as part of the Dimensiones paralelas (Parallel Dimensions) exhibition in Bilbao (2017), brings into play opposing kinds of vision.34 In the first, a more distanced view allows us to perceive the size, shape, and colour of each beetle, grasping how each compares and contrasts with the other beetles placed alongside it. This kind of vision sees beyond surfaces and textures to the underlying forms, the structural similarities and differences that are the basis of Linnaean classifications. But the video images soon change to focus precisely on those surfaces, zooming in to the point at which they lose form, or acquire new forms that were not visible to the distanced eye (see Fig. 2.8).
The juxtaposition of the two kinds of vision encourages us to focus on what becomes visible or invisible in each: how the use of devices to alter scale and perspective shapes our understanding of what we see. Creating a further series of distortions, the video was projected onto rotating screens that appeared to stretch and shrink the images (see Fig. 2.9). The gyration of the screens was also intended to encourage viewers to move around the exhibition, as they had to shift their position to be able to view the video.35
The use of optical devices in Villavicencio’s work challenges our association of machines with objective vision, an association that has been fundamental to the development of modern science. To the nineteenth-century scientist, machines seemed to offer freedom from subjectivity, being “ignorant of theory and incapable of speculation.”36 Mechanical objectivity became “a guiding if not the guiding ideal of scientific representation” across many disciplines.37 Villavicencio’s work lends a new role to optical devices, not in erasing the self in our representations of the natural world, but in expanding and deepening our encounters with it. The artist asks:
¿Cómo sería una historia alternativa de las superficies microscópicas si rechazásemos el punto de vista de un observador desinteresado? Estas herramientas “clínicas” pueden utilizarse para descubrir cosas que la ciencia occidental no tenía intención de descubrir, o no sabía cómo hacerlo, o cómo buscarlo.38
(What would an alternative history of microscopic surfaces look like if we were to reject the viewpoint of a disinterested observer? These “clinical” tools can be used to discover things that Western science had no intention of discovering, or did not know how to, or how to look for them.)
Dimensiones paralelas assembles works that were both live and mediated, mechanical and digital.39 These are positioned together in an exhibition space in such a way that viewers are encouraged to move around and between them, understanding them as discrete artworks while reflecting on their potential affiliations. One of the pieces bears the title Megatherium, the name of a species of giant ground sloth endemic to South America, now extinct. Discovered in Argentina in 1787, the first megatherium remains were shipped to the Museo Nacional de Ciencias in Madrid, where they are still exhibited. To create his work, Villavicencio used a high-resolution 3D scanner (from the Mechanical Engineering department of the Escuela Politécnica Nacional) to reproduce a fossil from the collection, adding other elements with Rhino 3D software before printing it and covering it with a layer of bacteria (see Fig. 2.8). The bacteria continue to grow over the course of the exhibition, endowing the pale surfaces of the fossil with dark blotches. The piece is thus a fictional, composite creature. The inspiration came from Villavicencio’s research in the Archivo General de Indias, where he found references to hybrid beasts in the illustrations drawn by colonial chroniclers, and from a curious image painted on the roof of a museum located in the Iglesia de San Francisco, the oldest church in Quito, which combines the body of an animal with the head of a human.40 Images such as these were typical in the discrepant accounts of the early colonial period, which purported to present objective descriptions but often overlaid the myths of the Old World onto the New. Villavicencio draws on the capacity of digital techniques to create hybrid images of his own, observing that “el mundo digital está pensado para el remix, la combinación de archivos, una fusión del monstruo” (the digital world is designed for remixes, the combination of archives, a fusion of the monster).41 Enclosed in a glass dome, Villavicencio’s hybridized fossil rotates smoothly on its axis, ensuring that its ridges and cavities continually advance and retract before our eyes.
The devices used to render objects mobile in Dimensiones Paralelas are both digital and mechanical. Behind Megatherium, large hanging banners printed with magnified images of bacterial activity are activated with the aid of electric fans, which cause them to crumple and crease as they respond to the current of air.42 In putting the objects of scientific knowledge in motion, Villavicencio effectively animates the static gaze of the museum spectator, multiplying perspectives in a way that gestures toward the continually shifting nature of our relations with other organisms and environments. The simultaneous presence of live and mediated elements in Villavicencio’s installations demonstrate how visual technologies alter and expand perception. In Jardín (Garden), viewers may view from above a small selection of medicinal plants, native to Ecuador, which are presented in wooden boxes placed on the floor; their vision is also augmented by the projection onto a screen, a few feet away, of sequences captured live by a tiny video camera moving in, over and between the plants (see Fig. 2.11). Visual technologies are deployed here to make a greater immersion and dynamism possible, as the close-up shots reveal textures and perspectives that would otherwise be difficult for us to access.
As Villavicencio explains, the separation of ourselves from our object of study is only one path that scholars have chosen: another possibility is to “acercarse al punto cero de ese objeto de estudio, donde tal vez no puedas entender ese objeto en su totalidad pero sí puedes fijarte en fisuras o en huellas microscópicas que quedan grabadas en la historia” (move closer to the zero point of that object of study, where perhaps you will not be able to understand that object in its totality but you will be able to detect fissures and microscopic traces that are etched into history).43 When technologies are deployed to disrupt the smooth, static nature of an “objective” gaze, it becomes more obvious to us how they mediate our knowledge of the world. Villavicencio’s devices make visible the “fissures” and “traces” that are obscured in the construction of objectivity.
One of the elements of Dimensiones paralelas that achieves this most clearly is Garden Exercises (2017), a collaboration with Agata Mergler. The piece includes a seven-minute video filmed in a garden in Quito.44 It is part of a project designed by Villavicencio and Mergler to explore haptic modes of filmmaking, emphasizing the role of the whole body rather than simply the organ of sight in the production of images. Their aim was to explore how a photographer might move beyond their role as a mere “functionary” (Vilém Flusser) of the apparatus; they envision the artist instead as “an agent capable of modifying and subverting the existing filming apparatus.”45 This subversion is a result of the use of open-source hardware and software to modify devices, defying Flusser’s description of the camera as a “black box” whose workings are inaccessible to the photographer.46 The principal modification made was to build “haptic cameras,” which are attached to the user’s hands (see Fig. 2.12). In this way, Villavicencio and Mergler wished to explore the possibilities for a more intimate relationship with the objects being filmed that is opened up by the faculty of touch, compared with that of sight, which—as Laura Marks argues—is much more aligned with post-industrial metropolitan experience and with the exercise of control.47 The displacement of the eye “implies a different approach to distance and a particular way of dealing with space, typical for touch. That is: a fragmentary, not totalizing, way of representing space.”48
Macro photography, which was originally developed for scientific research, is here put to very different ends as the lenses hover, spin, and drift unsteadily through the branches and their fruits. The veins of leaves come in and out of focus as hands stray across them. The effect of fragmentation is enhanced by a coded script that turned each camera off and on at certain moments. Operating the cameras was also a collaborative experience in which the participants had to coordinate the movement of their bodies in space. The short length of the cables connecting the cameras to the recording system required them to move in synchrony and close proximity.49
The unfamiliar visions generated by Villavicencio’s exhibitions encourage us to question how our understanding of the world has been shaped by the totalizing and objectifying perspectives that became central to scientific modes of observation in the eighteenth century. The perspectives generated give us another view of fossils, insects, and plants that undermines their morphological integrity, that is, the particular forms that allow them to be classified as this or another species. Surfaces become abstract textures and our sense of scale is also interrupted. The neutrality of the objective image was, of course, an illusion; these projects allow us to reflect on what kind of world it gave us, and what alternative worlds we might encounter through other kinds of visual or embodied interaction.
In their exploration of the relationship between the eye, the body, and machines, Mergler and Villavicencio found points of contact with the work of Jonathan Crary.50 Crary maintains that optical devices are not simply material objects; they are “embedded in a much larger assemblage of events and powers.” Countering a crude technological determinism, in which modes of perception are reduced to the effects of changing technical practices, Crary argues that optical devices should be understood as “points of intersection where philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic discourses overlap with mechanical techniques, institutional requirements, and socioeconomic forces.”51 Crary’s seminal work—Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990)—excludes any mention of the colonial purposes served by many of the visual technologies he discusses, including photography and cinema. The decolonial impetus of Villavicencio’s work emerges most clearly in the tension he creates between the ideals of objectivity, universality, and critical distance to which Western knowledge became bound in the nineteenth century and the more intimate encounters with the natural world facilitated by alternative technologies, many of them associated with indigenous cultures, and which have produced a different kind of knowledge.
In an installation designed for the 2021 Cuenca Bienal (see Fig. 2.13), Villavicencio brought Selecciones together with a series of works inspired by the collection of pre-Columbian artefacts held at the Museo Antropológico y de Arte Contemporáneo in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Moulds were printed from 3-D scans of the original artefacts, which allowed Villavicencio to recreate the pieces in ceramic. Many of these works engage senses other than vision and encourage an embodied response on the part of the gallery visitor, who is permitted to wander between (and sometimes over) them, and to listen to soundscapes that come in and out of audibility as they move through the exhibition space. In Silbato (Whistle), two interconnected conical ceramic vessels, joined at the base, are filled with water. As the object is tilted (with the help of a motorized stand), the water moves and the change in pressure creates a whistling sound. The piece is a “relectura” (re-reading) of similar whistling pots exhibited in the museum, many of which take the form of the animal whose sound they reproduce. The Espejo sonoro (Resonant Mirror) was also fashioned in a way that recalled the shape of pre-Columbian vessels, some of which recreated the forms of plants or fruit. Its concave shape created an echo as the sound of a hyperdirectional speaker bounced off its surface. The speaker produced an effect of intimacy, as if the sounds were being whispered in the ear; rather than being immersed in ambient sound, the visitor had to stand close to the sculpture to hear them.
The sound transmitted by the speaker was the audio track of a video, Tecnologías de la experiencia (Technologies of Experience, 2021), filmed in the Parque Yasuní in Ecuador. It features Fernando Alvarado, an elder of the Alta Florencia community, who had been asked to reproduce with his own voice the sounds of the animals he could hear as he travelled along the river. The astonishing repertoire of sounds that Alvarado is able to articulate is no less impressive than the keenness of his ear, alert to the rich diversity of animal life surrounding him. His imitations become a gesture of reciprocity, an openness to nonhuman signs and languages. They suggest the extent to which sound is a crucial means of orientation among the dense vegetation of the region. Villavicencio wished to capture this reliance on the aural as a way of registering and analysing the natural environment. As he observes, “hay un nivel sónico de entender la realidad, un nivel que no está basado en la visión solamente sino también en lo sonoro” (there is a sonic level at which reality can be understood, a level that is not based on vision alone but also on sound).52
The final piece of the exhibition, Resonar/excavar (Resonate/Excavate), comprised a low-lying wooden platform, whose shape echoed the snake coils of Selecciones, into which speakers playing sounds of very low frequency had been inserted. Visitors could stand or walk over the speakers and sense the vibrations emanating from them, which produced a kind of “estado alterado” (altered state).53 Resonance creates relationships that knit bodies and objects together in a complex and reciprocal system. It does not allow for a division between subject and object, expressing instead our thorough entanglement with our environment. Villavicencio reflects on the significance of the resonating body in pre-Hispanic cosmovisions: “el cuerpo danzante, el cuerpo que hace sonido, en este movimiento ritual heterosonoro, es sumamente preponderante” (the dancing body, the body that makes sound, in that hetero-resonant ritual movement, is extremely important).54
In creating a dialogue between Western epistemologies and ancestral knowledge in Ecuador, Villavicencio wished to explore the kind of situated knowledges that are embraced in Yuk Hui’s notion of “cosmotechnics.” Hui argues that “Scientific and technical thinking emerges under cosmological conditions that are expressed in the relations between humans and their milieus, which are never static.”55 Far from understanding nature and technics as opposed, he proposes “cosmotechnics” as a way of unifying the two: as an epistemic project that would seek alternatives to the kind of hegemonic synchronization to which modern technologies are contributing.56 Cosmotechnics “allows us to trace different technicities, and contributes to opening up the plurality of relations between technics, mythology, and cosmology—and thereby to the embracing of the different relations between the human and technics inherited from different mythologies and cosmologies.”57 It is precisely the relationship between multiple technics and cosmologies that emerges as the underlying theme of Villavicencio’s recent work.
Conclusion
Baroque cabinets of curiosities, with their cornucopia of exotic specimens, would gradually be replaced with more systematic collections that swapped the marvellous for the universal and rejected diversity for a narrower focus on specific areas of knowledge. If early modern cabinets of curiosities presented the world as a continuum, as “one great unbroken chain” of correspondences and analogies, natural history collections from the eighteenth century onwards placed greater emphasis on differences rather than affinities in their attempt to catalogue the natural world.58 Robert Hooke famously called for as full and complete a collection of objects as possible, in which an inquirer might “read the Book of Nature,” parsing its varieties with care; such collections should not be for the “Divertisement, and Wonder and Gazing” of viewers with a childlike desire to be pleased.59
La Padula and Villavicencio adopt some of the modes of presentation that were characteristic of cabinets of curiosities and natural history collections in order to raise questions about the particular ways in which they ordered nature, as well as to redeem something of value in the encounters they stage. Surekha Davies argues that cabinets “constituted knowledge through processes of compression,” bringing diverse things into physical proximity in the same visual and physical space. The series of juxtapositions they created prompted “fresh questions” on the part of viewers, as each visual arrangement “drew attention to different material characteristics, meanings, and uses of things.”60 In the same way, art installations that rework and remediate collections of objects provoke questions about the relationships between art, science, and nature, and how these have changed over history. The vision of the oneness of the world that is evoked by the visual correspondences of the baroque cabinet is one that regains a particular imaginary force in our own time, as we become more acutely aware of the interconnections between living things and other species and their environments.
Referring to the “compression, ontological disruption, and delight at a world turned upside-down by the shocks of new things” that characterize early modern cabinets, Davies suggests that this “fluidic quality in practices of display” might usefully be deployed in collections of the future to unseat essentialist thinking and to engage more deeply with ethical questions of curation and decolonization.61 One such question might be directed to the relationship between scientific knowledge and accumulation. Walter Benjamin identifies the “Baroque ideal of knowledge” as one of “stockpiling.”62 It was in this period that many of the great libraries and collections of Europe were founded. As José Ramón Marcaida López argues, “En buena medida, la ciencia moderna podría caracterizarse como el resultado de un ambicioso proyecto de acumulación a todos los niveles” (in good measure, modern science could be characterized as the result of an ambitious project of accumulation at every level).63 In that process, the collecting of marvels in the Baroque period and their conversion into commodities emerges as a paradigmatic case.64 Reinserting the Baroque era into the history of science, from which it has largely been excluded, draws attention to this relationship between knowledge, marvels, and the circulation of objects in the early colonial world. It also returns us to the emphasis on the sensory and the material in encounters with the natural world, which predates the relative priority given to texts over images and objects in Enlightenment museums.
Oliver Impey and Arthur Macgregor find in the inclusion of manufacturing tools in early modern collections “an allusion to human ingenuity”; likewise, Elisabeth Scheicher describes rare pieces of fine craftmanship in wood and ivory as a demonstration of “‘man’s ability to overcome the difficulties” presented by raw materials, and the addition of scientific instruments such as compasses and astrolabes as a testimony to “man’s ability to dominate nature.”65 The inclusion of pieces of art and laboratory equipment in La Padula’s collections and optical devices in those of Villavicencio do not, in contrast, celebrate the ability of humans to tame and commodify nature. Instead, by historizing how nature has been captured in Western knowledge and culture, they allow us to glimpse the possibility of alternative kinds of encounter. The philosopher Yuk Hui observes that the use of technologies to scale our vision up or down, zooming in through the microscope or out through a telescope, augments our senses in a way that is “about improving the capacity of the senses, but not about developing other senses that would allow us to preserve and renew our relations with other beings and the world itself.”66 In art, Hui finds a space in which the technological augmentation of the senses may be explored and brought into relationship with other forms of sense perception. He contends that “Scientific thinking wants to improve the capacity of the senses, while philosophical thinking wants to develop other senses. It is in art that both can be united.”67
It is certainly the case that the work of La Padula and Villavicencio creates new or renewed relationships between art and science. While scientists and artists had collaborated closely in the production of illustrations from the sixteenth century onwards, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison observe that, from the early nineteenth century, “The rise of the objective image polarized the visual space of art and science,” as both the self and subjectivity were rigorously purged from scientific images.68 The installations created by La Padula and Villavicencio may be read as an attempt to reimbue scientific images and collections with traces of the subjective encounters from which they were never, in reality, separated. They also depict a natural world that is rich in its own creativity. In European cabinets of curiosities, Davies maintains that the juxtaposition of “natural” objects with those wrought by artists “challenge the notion of art as something exclusively made by people.”69 The separation of the natural and the artificial in later natural history collections responds to a narrower definition of art in which “conscious human fabrication” was central.70 Exhibitions by La Padula and Villavicencio explore expanded notions of art and nature in ways that acknowledge the thorough interpenetration of nature and culture in human society. They call for a renewed understanding of the importance of a material, embodied connection with a natural world from which we had thought ourselves disconnected. Early cabinets of curiosities created a world that was thoroughly shaped by human intervention. In a similar way, La Padula and Villavicencio coincide in their refusal to present a positivist vision of “the universe without man,” in Baudelaire’s resonant phrase.71
See endnotes at source.
Chapter 2: New Cabinets of Curiosities, from Decolonial Ecologies: The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art, published by Open Book Publishers (05.03.2023) under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International license.