Floras, Herbaria, and Botanical Illustration in Early Modern Latin America

**From *Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España*. / Public Domain**

Indigenous nomenclature generally categorized plants according to their culinary, medicinal, or religious uses.

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 strong ties between botany and medicine in the ancient and medieval worlds gave rise to methods of classifying plants that were based on human uses, giving details of how plants could be used as cures for different ailments and how each should be gathered, preserved, and prepared. Local names for plants prevailed, and the knowledge distilled in medieval herbals was often acquired through personal experience or handed down from previous generations. The indigenous nomenclature that European colonizers found in use in the New World also generally categorized plants according to their culinary, medicinal, or religious uses.¹ European scientists who travelled to the region in the early colonial period often drew on these classifications to produce surveys and compendia of plant life. The Renaissance physician Francisco Hernández de Toledo (1514–1587) travelled to (what is now called) Mexico in 1570; he spent seven years describing and classifying plants and animals, which he organized alphabetically according to Nahuatl names of plants and groupings of plants. In his Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (c. 1577), the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún also employed Nahuatl terms, paying careful attention to the habitats of the species he lists and their different uses, including their medicinal benefits and hallucinatory effects. He divides his material into categories such as plants that are suitable for eating raw, plants that are eaten cooked, medicinal plants, and poisonous plants. Such forms of classification were later to be rejected by European naturalists in favour of the more abstract, universal taxonomies championed by the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus and his disciples.

The overwhelming influx of new botanical material from the colonies in the eighteenth century prompted the search in Europe for more robust and universal methods of organizing knowledge. The sheer number of unknown species, which made classifying them an enormous task, ensured that taxonomy remained a priority in botany for most of the eighteenth century.² In the new system of plant classification developed by Linnaeus, morphology was emphasized over function, behaviour, or evolution: the search for a clear, simple, and unified system of describing plants took priority over more complex questions concerning how they grew or interacted with their environment. The aim was to describe each individual plant in a way that accorded it a place within the diversity of all plants, providing a comprehensive overview of different varieties. Such knowledge was considered to be invaluable in exploiting the economic benefits of plants, which—as Linnaeus wrote—were “of great utility to the human race” and should be “assiduously researched.”³

The major scientific expeditions to the New World sponsored by the Spanish Crown in the second half of the eighteenth century were indeed primarily designed to ascertain what economic benefits could be derived from plants in the region. Botanists were sent to research the potential medical and commercial uses of plants that did not exist in Europe.⁴ In Spain, more than in any other European nation, a knowledge of medicinal plants and the promotion of a pharmaceutical industry became central concerns of the State.⁵ Scholars have emphasized the importance of botanical art in facilitating a relationship between science and commerce. This was again particularly marked in the case of the Spanish Empire, whose expeditions resulted in a much greater production of images.⁶ As Mauricio Nieto Olarte explains, once plants were removed from their habitats and either dried or drawn, they became types, which could more easily be examined, compared, and reordered. The act of illustrating nature allowed its complexity to be simplified, domesticated, and made intelligible.⁷ Daniela Bleichmar describes the Spanish natural history expeditions as “visualization projects,” designed to make nature “movable, knowable, and—ideally—governable.”⁸

As mentioned above, from the eighteenth century, plants were classified in Western science in ways that located them in systems of similarities and differences with other plants, not in relation to humans or to the broader ecosystems in which they participated. The four artists introduced in this chapter—all from Colombia—create images and collections of plants or seeds that bear witness instead to the entanglement of plant and animal (including human) lives, particularly with respect to agricultural practices. Each allows us to read human agency with respect to plant life in rather different ways, however.

In Alberto Baraya’s work, the global circulation of plants traces patterns of dispossession, as the (neo)colonial management of agriculture produces and deepens racial and economic inequalities. His Herbario de plantas artificiales (2002–) exposes these inequalities and suggests (symbolic) forms of reparation. He gathers highly commodified reproductions of flowers, which have been dispatched across the world in search of new markets, and reinserts them in other circuits of meaning to highlight the many cultural, social, medicinal, and spiritual values that plants have acquired in human societies. Eulalia de Valdenebro documents and performs human-plant encounters that demonstrate how humans have shaped the evolution of plants, for good and for ill. Del páramo al desierto, 19–21 (2009) brings to the fore that which tended to be erased in early nineteenth-century botanical illustrations, which showed an idealized portrait of nature devoid of human influence. Heterogéneas/Criminales(2014) denounces the loss of biodiversity and food sovereignty that has resulted from genetic engineering in agriculture. In her illustrations, De Valdenebro forges relationships of greater equality and equivalence between her own body and that of the plants she paints. In On the Marriages of Plants (2018), María Fernanda Cardoso gives vibrant expression to Linnaeus’s account of plant sexuality, but also highlights the intimate relationships with many other species that are crucial to reproduction and survival, creating a much more integrated understanding of nature that ultimately suggests limits to human agency. Illustrations by Abel Rodríguez (formerly known as Mogaje Guihu) give us insight into the reciprocal relationships that bind humans with the forest and its other inhabitants in the crop-growing practices developed by indigenous communities in Colombia. His work points to the potential in polyculture to increase biodiversity, mapping out a much more positive and collaborative role for humans in shaping forest ecosystems and producing a vision of the forest in which the natural, the social, and the spiritual are fully integrated.

Directly or indirectly, all four artists challenge the unified, simplified systems of eighteenth-century botany. Baraya, De Valdenebro and Cardoso work to reconnect plant taxonomies with other forms of knowledge and experience that were discredited during the Enlightenment, while Rodríguez articulates a very different approach to plant life that has not, unlike many Western concepts of nature, been forged on a division between humans and the rest of the natural world. This division has led to ecological degradation on a vast scale but re-emerges in the principle of conservation, which defines nature as something that needs special protection from human activity. In the practices and relationships Rodríguez depicts—and brings into being—in his work, we glimpse a version of anthropogenic ecological change which is far from catastrophic, and from which many species benefit.

Alberto Baraya: Botanical Expeditions, Herbaria, and the Natural History of Capitalism

Alberto Baraya frames several of his projects with reference to the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Granada (1783–1816), led by José Celestino Mutis, a Spanish mathematician, botanist, and physician.⁹ The expedition, which employed dozens of scientists and artists, investigated aspects of natural history, geography, zoology, astronomy, and mining. The exquisite illustrations that catalogued the region’s flora stretched to almost 6000 folio drawings. Although they were more stylized than most, the images produced generally adhered to the norms of botanical illustration in the eighteenth century in Europe. The figure at the centre of a typical plate demonstrated the “habit” of the plant (its general appearance and architecture), with details and transverse sections of the calyx, petals, and fruit often arranged at the foot, allowing the plant to be successfully identified according to the Linnaean system.

This format is employed for many of the plates designed for Baraya’s Herbario de plantas artificiales (Herbarium of Artificial Plants, 2002–), with the rather significant difference that the specimens shown are not of native flora but artificial flowers, the great majority made in China, fashioned from plastic, fabric, and wire. Baraya collects his samples from the environments in which they are often to be found: cafés, offices, hotel bathrooms, churches, airports, and shop windows. The flowers dominate the plate, with dissections arrayed below; a handwritten label details the origin of the plant and the materials used for its petioles, stamens, and other parts.

In many ways, then, Baraya’s plates imitate the design of the illustrations produced for the New Granada expedition. Those plates did not typically represent real, individual plants, either: they were composite images that smoothed out the accidental and the anomalous to create a single, idealized version of the plant.¹⁰ The quest for a universal taxonomy of plants led to an approach that was zealously exact in its depiction of the essence of each plant but disregarded the imperfections of a particular specimen or any characteristics that were not considered common to the species. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an allegiance to what might be called “truth-to-nature” obliged the naturalist to be “steeped in but not enslaved to nature as it appeared.”¹¹

Fig. 3.1 Alberto Baraya, Taxones Tabatinga (2014) from the *Herbario de plantas artificiales*. Found object “Made in China,” photography and drawing on cardboard, 56.0 x 82.0 cm (photograph by the artist)

The perfect specimens Baraya uses are not abstracted from their contexts in a quest for a universal type, however: they are surrounded by texts, photographs, and other illustrations that celebrate the local, the contingent, the subjective, the affective, and the cultural nature of our relationship with plants and flowers. Some of the Herbario plates include a photographed “comparative study”in which a plastic fruit—designed to represent the recognizable essence of a coconut or a cacao pod—is held next to a real one, showing the deviations in colour, form, or texture of the genuine article in comparison with its idealized reproduction. Photographs tie specimens to specific places or people that Baraya meets on his travels, demonstrating how his artworks arise from chance connections and discoveries. In Taxones Tabatinga¹² (Tabatinga Taxons, 2014), for example, Baraya catalogues the different kinds of artificial plants and flowers he finds in a decorative display in a hairdressing salon owned by Nicolasa, who appears in a photograph placed next to the species identified, brandishing her bouquet with a coquettish smile (see Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.2 Alberto Baraya, Borrachero doble (Double Devil’s Trumpet, 2014) from the *Herbario de plantas artificiales*. Found object “Made in China,” photography and drawing on cardboard, 112.0 x 82.0 cm (photograph by the artist).

In a similar way, other Herbario plates contain photographs showing the shop windows or market stalls where flowers were found or the cultural uses to which they are put. Such references to specific natural or human environments are entirely absent from the illustrations commissioned by Mutis and other leaders of New World expeditions. Baraya’s plates reconnect the natural and cultural histories that were torn apart in eighteenth-century abstractions. In a plate dedicated to an artificial reproduction of a Brugmansia or Datura species (Borrachero Doble; Double Devil’s Trumpet, 2014), he includes photographs of the natural environments in which the real plants, which contain toxic hallucinogens, are typically found, as well as notes on their use in Europe and America by magicians and shamans for the healing of wounds or the divination of a patient’s illnesses (see Fig. 3.2).

Fig. 3.3 Juan Francisco Mancera, Giganton. Datura from the Drawings of the Royal Botanical Expedition to the New Kingdom of Granada. Image from the digitalization project of the drawings of the Royal Botanical Expedition to the New Kingdom of Granada (1783–1816) directed by José Celestino Mutis: www.rjb.csic.es/icones/mutis. Real Jardín Botánico-CSIC. Reproduced by kind permission of the Real Jardín Botánico

By contrast, the elegant Datura illustration produced for Mutis (see Fig. 3.3) is full of botanical information that would aid identification, folding flowers and spiny fruit into its design, but it reveals nothing beyond the morphology of the plant, which is set against a plain white background.^13.

As Mary Louise Pratt affirms, the European exercise of natural history “elaborated a rationalizing, extractive, dissociative understanding which overlaid functional, experiential relations among people, plants, and animals.”¹⁴ In an operation that was deeply appropriative at heart, life forms across the planet “were to be drawn out of the tangled threads of their life surroundings and rewoven into European-based patterns of global unity and order.”¹⁵ While this process is erased in the handsome compositions of the New Granada plates, Baraya traces very plainly how his own specimens are caught up in patterns of global trade and consumption. Next to the dense green foliage and sepia petals of the Orquídea viajera (Travelling Orchid, 2013), we find a map of its “commercial and cultural routes,” linking the artificial flowers market in Yiwu, China, to retail outlets from Madrid to Miami; a further series of connecting lines trace the flowers’ artistic reinsertion into landscapes during Baraya’s journeys to New Zealand, Machu Picchu, and elsewhere.

As well as simplifying nature, making it more legible and fit to enter a pre-established system of classification, the illustrations made during expeditions to the Americas allowed specimens to transcend time and space, protecting them against the decay they would otherwise suffer on the long journey across the ocean. Through the creation of permanent inscriptions on paper, the immense variety of nature could be condensed, flattened, and shipped back to Europe, to be measured, compared, ordered, and assigned values. As Mutis famously claimed, his illustrations characterized each plant so fully and accurately that no one viewing them would actually need to travel to search for them in their native environment.¹⁶ For Latour, these and other “immutable mobiles” played a vital role in the rise of capitalism and the European domination of other cultures.¹⁷ As such inscriptions were “superimposed, reshuffled, recombined, and summarized” in Europe’s “centers of calculation,” merchants, engineers, cartographers, and others drew benefit from the new ideas and phenomena that emerged, which remained “hidden from the other people from whom all these inscriptions have been exacted.”¹⁸

The economic exploitation of America that was the ultimate aim of the New World expeditions may have been suppressed in the illustrations produced for Mutis, but it was a prominent reference in correspondence about the project. The huge expense of such expeditions was primarily justified by the financial gains that an increased knowledge of its colonies’ natural resources was likely to secure for Spain. Writing to his King in 1763, Mutis reaffirms the profit and the glory that would surely derive from his expedition. Following some complaints about the discomforts of the “verdaderamente austera y desabrida” (truly austere and unpleasant) life of the naturalist, he lists the many riches that the land of America offers the Spanish crown, from gold and precious stones to wood and plants of many kinds: all produced “para la utilidad y el comercio” and “para el bien del genero [sic] humano” (for use and trade; for the good of the human race).¹⁹

**Fig. 3.4 Alberto Baraya, Cacao, beso de cacao (2018) from the Tumaco Expedition, *Herbario de plantas artificiales*. Found object, drawing and photography on cardboard (photograph by the artist)**

The decolonial thrust of Baraya’s work emerges most powerfully in a series that attends to this relationship between natural history and commerce, together with the racial politics of (neo)colonialism. As part of an expedition to Tumaco, a city in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia, Baraya produced a series of plates on cacao, one of the main crops grown in the region. Cacao, beso de cacao (Cacao, Cacao Kiss,2018) features the longitudinal cross-section of a cacao pod made—as the description below tells us—of thermoformed plastic with a heart of polystyrene foam (see Fig. 3.4). Below, where we would normally expect to see smaller illustrations of the plant’s characteristic features, Baraya inserts wrappers for a chocolate-covered candy manufactured by Nestlé called “Beso de negra” (black woman’s kiss).²⁰ The bold red packaging is adorned with images of voluptuous lips and an alluring black woman in a shoulderless dress. As Baraya notes in a label below, the sensual experience offered by the combination of cacao and sugar is promoted via an exoticizing depiction of racial difference.

In Cacao, conguito (2018), another plate in the series, the artificial red fruit of a cacao tree is accompanied by a small reproduction mounted on cardboard of a black, round-bellied cartoon character. The image forms part of the branding for a range of products marketed in Spain under the name of Conguitos by Chocolates Lacasa, a Spanish confectionery company. The name conguitos is the diminutive version of a Spanish term for a black person (which derives from the country name Congo). The caricatured black character has full red lips and is carrying, as Baraya observes, “una lanza tipo tribal” (a tribal-style spear). This jaunty, exotic figure is used to promote the brand in Spain in a way that implicitly celebrates the racial dynamics of cacao production, as cacao growers tend to be black. Many African slaves were brought to work on plantations in Colombia and other countries in Latin America; today’s cacao farm labourers in former colonies in West Africa also work in conditions that approach those of slavery. Baraya’s plate exposes the operation of structural racism in global agricultural production, in both colonial and more recent eras.

The close relationship between racism and the emergence of a modern world-system based on extractivism is clearly outlined in the work of the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano. Ethnic categorizations were “the inevitable cultural consequence of coloniality” and were used to justify different kinds of labour control, including slavery and other forms of coerced labour.²¹ Quijano argues that modernity itself only emerges in Europe as a result of its imperial ventures in America: its constitution as a modern power rests historically on the wealth extracted from the region—gold, silver, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco—as a result of the free labour of Indians, mestizos, and African slaves.²² In this sense, “The Americas were not incorporated into an already existing capitalist world-economy. There could not have been a capitalist world-economy without the Americas.”²³ By the eighteenth century, however, Europeans had not only persuaded themselves that they had independently forged their own civilization, but that they were naturally and racially superior to other civilizations, as evidenced by their imperial domination over them.²⁴ It is this story—of the basis of modern capitalist European society in colonialism and racism—that is laid bare in Baraya’s works.

As José Roca points out, Baraya’s purloined plants—stolen from hotel receptions, restaurants, and shops—rehearse the thefts of colonial scientists engaged in acts of “collecting.” As well as bearing witness to a history of dispossession through forms of re-enactment, however, these expeditions also perform acts of restitution. For his Proyecto árbol de caucho (Latex Tree Project, 2006), Baraya travelled to the Acre region of Brazil, the scene of intensive rubber production and the expansion of European colonization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He worked with local rubber tappers to cover the surface of a thirty-metre rubber tree with liquid latex that had been extracted from other rubber trees, and then peeled off the cast. Exhibited at the XXVII São Paulo Biennial, the empty, flaccid rubber skin spoke to the boom and bust cycles of rubber production and their enormous and lasting social and environmental impact on the region.

Baraya’s absurd quest to collect and identify every type of artificial plant in the world mimics the overweening ambition of Enlightenment natural histories, but replaces their austere language with baroque proliferation and theatricality. For Severo Sarduy, the “obsessive repetition of a useless thing […] determines the Baroque as play, in contrast to the determination of the classical work as a labor.”²⁵ Other elements of Baraya’s plates also bear affinities with baroque aesthetics. While they are relatively simple in design, they employ the quintessential baroque technique of trompe l’oeil in their presentation of artificial plants that often trick the viewer into believing that they are real. They present matter as “folding, unfolding, refolding” in ways observed by Gilles Deleuze in his work on the baroque,²⁶ as they recycle and rework themes and forms from the past, trouble the division between the artist as subject and object, entangle the spiritual and the cultural with the material and commercial, and interweave the artificial and the organic, artistic convention and its critique. These recyclings, restitutions, and re-entanglements become part of a symbolic form of reparation in Baraya’s work, in response to the dissociative and dispossessive violence of global capitalism.

Domestication and Diversity: Human-Plant Entanglements in the Work of Eulalia de Valdenebro

In 2009, De Valdenebro was appointed to undertake a series of botanical illustrations, to be completed in a classical style. They were commissioned for a permanent exhibition on Francisco José de Caldas (1768–1816), a Colombian naturalist, mathematician, lawyer, and engineer whose work is celebrated in a museum bearing his name in central Bogotá. She agreed to provide the illustrations on the condition that she would create them in situ, according to her usual practice. The botanical illustrations produced for the famous Spanish expeditions to the New World were largely created by artists based in workshops, on the basis of ink sketches made quickly in the field or specimens brought back by naturalists or plant collectors.²⁷ In contrast, De Valdenebro works entirely from direct observation, completing as much as possible of her illustrations in the location where each plant is found. In the company of a self-taught naturalist, Mateo Hernández, she undertook a journey through many of the different climate zones in Colombia, selecting flowers from native plants to illustrate the texts by Caldas that would feature in the exhibition.

**Fig. 3.5 Eulalia de Valdenebro, photograph of cactus from *Del páramo al desierto*, 19–21 (2009). 50 x 70 cm**

Del páramo al desierto, 19–21 (From the Paramo to the Desert, 19–21, 2009) was conceived by De Valdenebro as the “negative” of the series of illustrations that she produced for the Casa Museo Francisco José de Caldas.²⁸ This alternative exhibition, shown simultaneously at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá, included sketches and photographs from De Valdenebro’s journey through Colombia’s climate zones. Instead of representing the pristine, idealized nature of nineteenth-century botany, however, she depicts a natural world that is thoroughly imprinted with human activity. Large-scale black-and-white photographs of the branches and twigs that have been carried along by the force of the Río Patía demonstrate the heightened flood risk caused by deforestation.²⁹

**Fig. 3.6 Eulalia de Valdenebro, photograph of climbing plant from *Del páramo al desierto*, 19–21 (2009). 50 x 70 cm**

Other photographs in colour provide snapshots of other kinds of human intervention. One shows how a cactus has grown to incorporate the rusting barbed wire that encircled it (Fig. 3.5), while another reveals how a climbing plant has twisted itself around a wire fence, using it as a support to reach further from its roots (Fig. 3.6). In a further photograph, grasses are starting to grow over a pile of abandoned beer bottle tops. Although the presence of barbed wire transecting plant tissues is disconcerting, these images do not ultimately direct our attention to the human devastation of nature; indeed, they testify more to the resilience and ingenuity of plants in adapting to, and even taking advantage of, artefacts of human culture. Above all, they bring into focus the condition of coexistence that binds humans and plants together, as closely as a vine wrapped around a length of wire.

**Fig. 3.7 Eulalia de Valdenebro, sketch from *Del páramo al desierto*, 19–21 (2009). 30 x 25 cm (photograph by the artist)**

The photographs are interspersed with unframed sheets of paper used to produce sketches, handwritten notes and colour tests for the botanical illustrations created for the Caldas exhibition (see, for example, Fig. 3.7). These notes and sketches are the result of an individual encounter with a plant; here they act as a deconstructed version of the final portrait, the proof—as De Valdenebro writes—that “el trabajo posterior es la construcción de un simulacro” (the work that ensues is the construction of a simulacrum).³⁰ It is this simulacrum of a pure, idealized, abundant, nineteenth-century version of nature that De Valdenebro finds to be responsible for the illusion of our separation from the natural world, which has allowed us to treat nature as a landscape to be “colonizado o admirado” (colonized or contemplated).³¹ Her counter-exhibition asks us to recognize our lives as fully imbricated in the natural world, enjoining us to take “un viaje urgente del 19 al 21” (an urgent journey from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first).

Fig. 3.8 Eulalia de Valdenebro, *Heterogéneas/Criminales* (2012). Watercolour on paper for heterogeneous seeds, digital reproduction from original in watercolour for homogeneous seeds (GMO), 120 x 60 cm (photograph by the artist)

This recognition of the deep integration between human culture and what we consider to be the natural world is also evident in Heterogéneas/Criminales (Heterogeneous/Criminales, 2012). The work is composed of two sets of illustrations, painted in watercolour: one of maize seeds (see Fig. 3.8) and the other of beans. In each, the upper series shows eight different varieties of the same species, while the lower line consists of eight digital reproductions of a transgenic seed, one identical to the next. A clear contrast is introduced between the surprising diversity of maize seeds and beans, of different colours, shapes, and textures, and the monotony of the transgenic versions below. Handwritten words accompany each series. The labels given to local varieties include “contenedores de vida,” “nativa,” and “heterogénea” (containers of life, native, heterogeneous). The local seed is “inestable” and “variable” (unstable, variable) but also “autónoma” and “soberana” (autonomous and sovereign). Reference is made to the practice of seed-swapping among farmers of different communities, as the seed is “única” and therefore “intercambiable” (unique, exchangeable). A contrasting set of terms is assigned to the transgenic seed. This is “global” and “homogénea” (global, homogeneous) as well as being “uniforme” (uniform), which may be a guarantee of “calidad” (quality). However, it is also for that reason “patentable” and leads to a “monopolio” (monopoly).

The upper series represents the values of agroecology; the lower series, of agribusiness. Maristella Svampa and Enrique Viale summarize the antagonism between the two models in this way:

mientras la agroecología apela a la autosuficiencia tecnológica, promueve el diálogo de saberes, se practica a través de un uso diversificado, apuesta a un modelo de pequeña escala, en reciprocidad con los procesos naturales; el agronegocio promueve la dependencia tecnológica, pretende el dominio epistemológico, defiende el uso especializado con tendencia al monocultivo, es sinónimo de concentración de la tierra y grandes propiedades y pretende controlar los procesos naturales.³²

(while agroecology has recourse to technological self-sufficiency, fosters a dialogue between knowledges, supports diverse practices, works on a small-scale, local level in operating in a relationship of reciprocity with natural processes; agribusiness promotes technological dependency, claims to be the only source of knowledge, defends specialist practices with an inclination for monocultures, is synonymous with the concentration of land ownership and huge properties and aims to control natural processes.)

De Valdenebro’s piece was created in 2012 in response to an attempt made by the Colombian government to introduce Law 1518 and Resolution 970, which effectively penalized the use of local seeds and criminalized farmers working with them, forcing them to buy patented seeds from transnational companies. De Valdenebro notes that although the law is currently in force, it is not legally binding.³³ Indeed, it has been deemed to be unenforceable as it affects the constitutional rights accorded to indigenous peoples and other protected minorities.³⁴

Although it presents a clear denunciation of the patenting and homogenizing of seeds, Heterogéneas/Criminales
does not censure human intervention in plant cultivation and crop improvement per se. The native seeds illustrated in the top row of each of De Valdenebro’s series owe their striking diversity to the domestication and selective breeding of different varieties by indigenous and peasant farmers of the Americas, a process that has taken thousands of years. The exchange of seeds in local communities (often through barter) aids the conservation of diversity and enables farmers to select varieties that are most suited to local climates and conditions. As Darwin observed, selection in plants and animals after domestication has produced enormous diversity that far outstrips variation in their wild ancestors.³⁵ The domestication of crops is considered “one of the most successful of all plant–animal mutualisms.”³⁶ Humans have benefited from more varied and reliable sources of food, with crops better adapted to local climates and cooking practices, while plants have benefited from a selection that has, as Darwin stated, more speedily “fit them for infinitely diversified conditions of life, to avoid enemies of all kinds, and to struggle against a host of competitors.”³⁷ Transgenic seeds, on the other hand, produced to a universal formula, are often poorly adapted and must be protected through a greater use of pesticides. De Valdenebro’s work thus celebrates the history of symbiotic relationships between humans and plants, while subjecting to critique the loss of diversity that has resulted from the appropriation and homogenization of native seeds by biotech companies.

**Fig. 3.9 Eulalia de Valdenebro, *Frailejonmetría comparada esc* 1:1 (2020). Watercolour on paper, 240 x 160 cm**

A rejection of the universal and the homogeneous also guides many of De Valdenebro’s more recent works of botanical illustration, which attempt to trace alternative encounters between humans and plants that are not ones of subordination and standardization. Frailejonmetría comparada esc 1:1 (Comparative Frailejonmetry scale 1:1, 2020) shows a frailejón (Espeletia grandiflora), a plant that grows in Colombia’s high-altitude páramos and is endemic to this ecosystem (Fig. 3.9).³⁸ In many ways, the illustration has been produced according to the traditions of botanical art: every detail of the plant’s appearance—its yellow flowers, the green leaves curling upwards, and the brown-grey marcescent leaves that droop below to form a skirt around the trunk—is richly and meticulously rendered in watercolour, and the proportions of its different parts have been reproduced with precision.³⁹ What is unexpected is the scale, as the plant is drawn at life-size, standing almost two-and-a-half metres tall. In another departure from convention, De Valdenebro completed the entire illustration on location in the páramo, travelling there every week for around a year.⁴⁰ But perhaps most striking is the artist’s decision to map her own body onto the paper, with the subtle contours of her head in profile just visible in a lighter tone in the head-like rosette of the frailejón.

For De Valdenebro, the extended encounter with the frailejón in its habitat and the decision to work at a 1:1 scale was a response to a plant that has often been anthropomorphized: it is a common experience, she explains, to feel that they are humanlike in their form and their distribution in small groupings.⁴¹ Drawing a specimen at full size was a logistical challenge in the extreme weather of the páramo: the illustration had to be composed in a number of smaller sections that were later assembled for exhibition.⁴² If antropometría is the study of the dimensions and proportions of the human body,and comparative anthropometry was a powerful tool of racial discrimination in colonial science, Frailejonmetría suggests the possible recuperation of this exercise for a more horizontal, egalitarian act of comparison and encounter between humans and plants. This act of anthropomorphism is simultaneously an act of phytomorphism.

**Fig. 3.10 Eulalia de Valdenebro, *Mapa de relaciones táctiles e*sc 1:1 (2020). Ink prints on paper. 160 x 160 cm**

This relationship of horizontality and reciprocity is emphasized in a related project by the same artist, Mapa de relaciones táctiles esc 1:1 (Map of Tactile Relations Scale 1:1, 2020).⁴³ Against a series of concentric circles traced on an enormous sheet of paper, which map out the plant seen from above, De Valdenebro imprinted different parts of her own body alongside those of the frailejón to show the relative size of each. She covered her hand, arm, foot, calf, ear, and face with dark red ink before pressing them onto the paper, placing them next to similar impressions made from the leaves and flowers of the frailejón (see Fig. 3.10). Hand-written inscriptions compare the dimensions of human and plant parts. The length of the petiole equals the width across the four knuckles of her hand, for example, while the petiole with its leaf are the same length as her outstretched forearm and hand. A flower head has the same size as her metatarsal bone and her eye socket, while the length of her arm measures the radius of seed dispersal from the trunk.

The startling precision of the measurements, the neatness of the circumferences and annotations, and the comprehensive inclusion of so many different body parts create—as De Valdenebro suggests—a parody of the scientific method.⁴⁴ In direct contrast to the use of universal measurements, which would objectify and dissociate the plant, she seeks body-to-body comparisons that are purely proportional and relational. This was an intentional move to situate herself in “en un momento premoderno” (in a pre-modern era), before the invention of the metre in the eighteenth century and its eventual adoption as a universal unit of measurement.⁴⁵ From the combination of a series of one-to-one comparisons emerged a common unit which De Valdenebro used to cut the paper used for Frailejonmetría comparada esc 1:1 into segments of a manageable size.

De Valdenebro’s work emerges from the local, the relational, from an intimate, embodied encounter between human and plant which is founded on affinity and equivalence. Rewriting the humanist principle that “Man is the measure of all things,” she creates an assemblage of human and plant in which each becomes the measure of the other. The many performances De Valdenebro has carried out in the páramo for her extended Cuerpospermeables project (Permeable Bodies, 2013–2021) also respond to a desire to configure performance differently, in a way that does not (solely) ascribe action to the human body, using the landscape as a backdrop. Instead, she allows her body to be traversed and permeated by the wind, the fog, and by other forces and forms of life, in an attempt to “ser intervenida en lugar de intervenir” (be intervened rather than intervene).⁴⁶

Although Linnaeus’s system for classifying plants went on to become the global standard, he himself advocated that “measurement should be made by the hand or stature of a man” rather than by geometrical rule.⁴⁷ It is a curious method, perhaps, to find recommended in the work of a scholar who has been so widely associated with the eighteenth-century turn toward objectivity and universalism. But Linnaeus judged approximate comparisons of this kind to be more convenient for a botanist in the field, and more appropriate given the variability of dimensions between two plants of the same species.⁴⁸ Linnaeus’s use of anthropomorphic comparisons was intended to allow even amateur botanists to participate in the classification of plants. As he wrote, “no simile is to be used, other than those derived from the external parts of the body, such as the ear, ﬁnger, navel, eye, scrotum, penis, vulva or breast; and not from the internal parts of the body, which are well known only to anatomists.”⁴⁹ His recommendations point to the fact that plants have always been known to us via comparison with animal (including human) bodies. In De Valdenebro’s work, this is taken as a starting point for an expanded expression of affinity, parity, and reciprocity. Her work suggests a kind of bioegalitarianism that does not erase the differences between species but finds in them a radical commensurability that is immediate and embodied.

María Fernanda Cardoso: Human Desires and Plant Sexuality

María Fernanda Cardoso’s exhibition On the Marriages of Plants (2018) draws on scientific research to create detailed photographs and rigorously precise three-dimensional models of the reproductive systems of plants. In her work, Cardoso engages explicitly with Linnaeus’s work on botanical classification, but in a way that emphasizes the most ludic and piquant elements of his work. She returns to Linnaeus’s provocative analogies between plant and human sexuality to suggest potential re-readings from feminist and post-anthropocentric perspectives.

Cardoso’s projects attempt to revive the theatricality of cabinets of curiosities, which was lost in the classificatory zeal of natural history collections. They also take inspiration from popular museums of the nineteenth century that used “technological innovation and technical virtuosity” to construct a “vivid visual language” with which to introduce novel facts and ideas to broad audiences.⁵⁰ On the Marriages of Plants, shown at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum (Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences) as part of a broader exhibition entitled Human non Human, develops some of the ideas and techniques that she had explored in earlier projects, particularly in the Museum of Copulatory Organs (2012).⁵¹ In creating intricate three-dimensional models of animal genitalia, Cardoso sought to draw attention to a world of extravagant diversity that is little known beyond the biology laboratory, as well as to understand the relationship between morphology and evolution: the theories that have been proposed to account for the astounding complexity and rapid divergence of genital forms.⁵²

**Fig. 3.11 Installation view of María Fernanda Cardoso, *On the Marriages of Plants* (2018) from Human non Human. Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia (photograph by Carlos Velásquez)**

On the Marriages of Plants was a celebration of the seductive beauty of the reproductive organs of flowering plants. A huge display cabinet was filled with silk blooms of many colours, shapes, and textures, lit dramatically in a darkened space to accentuate their vivid hues (Fig. 3.11). These flowers are not only aesthetically appealing, but also accurate scientific models, with the anatomy of their petals and reproductive parts rendered with precision.

**Fig. 3.12 Installation view of María Fernanda Cardoso, *On the Marriages of Plants* (2018) from *Human non Human*. Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia (photograph by Carlos Velásquez)**

Erected around the cabinet were “walls” made of large sheets of black fabric, onto which had been printed enlarged photographs of flowers with their petals removed, showing their stamens and pistils, responsible for producing pollen and ovules respectively (Fig. 3.12). Lighting was installed behind the fabric, shining through the flowers to give them a glowing luminosity. These “undressed” specimens had been photographed for an earlier project entitled Naked Flora (2013). Cardoso chose flowers from her local neighbourhood, stripped them of their petals, and used a macro lens combined with a technique called “focus stacking,” in which multiple photographs are blended to extend the depth of field of any single image. These images were magnified for display in On the Marriages of Plants. The result was a stunning rendition of the spectacular colours and exotic forms of plant reproductive systems, towering above human viewers.

These glamorous images were given titles according to the classification system laid out by Linnaeus in Systema Naturae (1735). In his Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum (Prelude to the Betrothal of Plants, 1729), Linnaeus had already explained plant reproduction with an effusive metaphor borrowed from human society, describing petals as an opulent marriage-bed, “perfumed with many delightful fragrances,” ready for the nuptials to be celebrated between bridegroom and bride.⁵³ The analogy is made even more explicit in Philosophia Botanica (1751), where Linnaeus spells out: “the CALYX is the bedroom, the COROLLA is the curtain, the FILAMENTS are the spermatic vessels, the ANTHERS are the testicles, the POLLEN is the sperm, the STIGMA is the vulva, the STYLE is the vagina, the [VEGETABLE] OVARY is the [animal] ovary, the PERICARP is the fertilized ovary, and the SEED is the egg.”⁵⁴ In his Clavis systematis sexualis (Key to the Sexual System), published in Systema Naturae, Linnaeus used terminology that thoroughly humanized plants within a lexicon of marriage, moving from defining parts as male or female to referring to them as andria and gynia, derived from the Greek for “husband” and “wife.” ⁵⁵ Plant marriages ranged from the decorous monandria (one husband in marriage) to the licentious icosandria (twenty husbands, often more) and the even more wanton polygamia (husbands live with wives and concubines in different beds).

It is generally agreed that Linnaeus’s provocative nomenclature—thrillingly scandalous in the cultural context of the eighteenth century—continued a tradition of pornographic analogies in the teaching of botany.⁵⁶ Linnaeus was certainly not the only (or the first) botanist to have drawn heavily on an understanding of animal copulation to ground his theories on analogies between the sexual organs of plants and those of animals.⁵⁷ To extend the metaphor even further with references to the specifically human social convention of marriage suggests a degree of anthropomorphization that most plant scientists would now reject as inaccurate or unhelpful (Linnaeus’s nomenclature considerably added, for example, to the eighteenth-century overestimation of the importance of heterosexual reproduction in plants). But what if Linnaeus’s aim in producing his “sexual system” was to comment on human society as much as to describe plant morphologies? In a lecture to his students, he described sexual activity as a necessity of nature that could not be subject to moral control without damage to health:

No dropsical person will be called drunkard, even if always thirsty. No child greedy and avaricious because it wants to eat. Hence no girl unchaste that wants men, since once the egg (ovum) swells she feels desire, and it would be a miracle should she not feel it.⁵⁸

In the twenty-first century, Cardoso’s exhibition delivers a similar critique of the enduring and widespread convention of monogamous marriage in many human societies, as she—like Linnaeus—stretches the single, inadequate term “marriage” to cover the immense variety of different and evolving reproductive arrangements that plants have created in their bid for survival. Naked Flora and On the Marriages of Plants celebrate the spectacular creativity involved in that enterprise, which is entirely beyond the reach of moral censure. “Nature is amoral,” Cardoso explains: “Whatever we do isn’t right and wrong, it just is. It doesn’t matter how many husbands you have.”⁵⁹ Rather than lapsing into lazy anthropomorphisms, then, Cardoso—like Linnaeus himself, perhaps—reverses the rhetoric, asking us to measure the strictures that often govern human procreation against the exuberant ingenuity and diversity of vegetal forms of reproduction.

**Fig. 3.13 Installation view of María Fernanda Cardoso, *On the Marriages of Plant*s (2018) from *Human non Human*. Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia (photograph by Carlos Velásquez)**

The excitement surrounding the discovery of plant sexuality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries outstripped a knowledge of how fertilization actually took place.⁶⁰ Linnaeus himself did not progress far in his understanding of the role of insects in pollination, believing that self-pollination was the rule, although he was also aware of the part played by the wind carrying pollen in certain cases.⁶¹ In this respect, Cardoso’s On the Marriages of Plants focuses on key revisions to Linnaeus’s theories, drawing on more recent research to stress the crucial role in plant sexual reproduction of reciprocal arrangements between different species that have co-evolved over millennia. Near her vivid array of silk flowers, Cardoso positioned further display cabinets, made in dark wood and glass, of nineteenth-century origin. These housed microscopes and papier mâché models of flowers and insects that were used to teach anatomy, all from the Powerhouse Museum collection, alongside enlarged models of different kinds of pollen grain that Cardoso had produced for her Museum of Copulatory Organs (Fig. 3.13). The importance of interspecies reciprocity in plant reproduction was also conveyed through a work of sound art commissioned for the gallery, which brought the space alive with the buzzing and chirping of bees, birds, and other pollinators.

Humans are also important pollinators of plants. The sheer beauty and seductive quality of Cardoso’s photographs points to the possibility that it is not only insects, birds, and other animals who are the intended audience for these displays of floral loveliness, but humans as well. This is also tacitly acknowledged in Linnaeus’s marriage-bed metaphor, which is effective because we are easily wooed by his alluring description of the flowers’ heady scents and the voluptuous softness of their petals. Indeed, plants may manipulate their human pollinators just as successfully as other species. The exhibition text for On the Marriages of Plants suggests that Cardoso’s work echoes Michael Pollan’s hypothesis that plants recruit us, by stimulating our taste and desire for beauty, to ensure their own survival.⁶² Flowers have evolved in a highly individuated way to attract specific insects, birds, and mammals by appealing to a range of senses (sight, touch, and smell). As Pollan writes, “We automatically think of domestication as something we do to other species, but it makes just as much sense to think of it as something certain plants and animals have done to us, a clever evolutionary strategy for advancing their own interests.”⁶³

However we understand the relationship between humans and plants to have evolved, it is clear that Cardoso’s work underlines the intricate alliances and synergies that have allowed species to thrive by partnering with others. Linnaeus’s projection of human desires and cultural conventions onto plant morphologies and functions betrays an important truth: that in a world that has been shaped through myriad co-evolutionary relationships, the changing desires and tastes of each species are inseparable from the destinies of others.

In curating Human non Human, Katie Dyer and Lizzie Muller sought to explore “how humans and our environment and everything that we’re involved with are in a constant process of bringing each other into being through interaction.” They selected artists, Cardoso among them, “who could move knowledge into a sensory experience.”⁶⁴ Cardoso’s projects enable us to understand the profound connection between these two aims. Her work cannot be reduced to a quest to make science visually appealing and entertaining for a mass audience, worthy though such an aim might be; it also reveals the extent to which it is our sensory immersion in the world that has thoroughly shaped the evolution of human biology and culture, just as we have shaped other species in turn. For the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, the plant is “the paradigm of immersion” in its total and constant exposure to the world around it; this immersion is not a passive experience but the “mutual compenetration between subject and environment, body and space, life and medium.”⁶⁵ Cardoso’s recreation of the “visual y vivencial” (visual and experiential) language of pre-Enlightenment science, with its greater focus on a mode of communication that is “corporal y participativo” (embodied and participatory),⁶⁶ is a fitting way to probe how plant sexuality enlists the sense perceptions and actions of other species, and to reflect on the intricate interspecies entanglements that turn all evolution into co-evolution.

Abel Rodríguez and the Storied Worlds of Plant Cultivation in the Amazon

**A closure event of the capacity building process of the Nonuya Villazul Reservation. (Photo: SCIOA) / Courtesy Pact**

Abel Rodríguez (Mogaje Guihu) is a member of the Nonuya community, which has traditionally occupied lands to the south of the Cahuinarí River in the Amazonas region of Colombia. Formerly very numerous, the community is now reduced to fewer than one hundred, with only four members able to speak the Nonuya language with competence. During the rubber boom at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, the Nonuya—along with other people groups of the region—were enslaved, tortured, and murdered, with the remainder displaced to another part of the Amazon; this violence, added to the effects of multiple epidemics, caused their near-extinction, and the few who returned to their original territory had to merge with other communities.⁶⁷ Mogaje Guihu was brought up speaking Muinane and served his community as a sabedor de plantas, with extensive knowledge of the great diversity of native plants and how they interact with other elements of the Amazonian ecosystem. He later adopted the name Abel Rodríguez and moved to Bogotá in the 1990s to escape new forms of violence. There, he took up drawing and painting, having been encouraged to document his knowledge in this way by a Dutch NGO working to protect the Amazon (and for whom he had previously worked as a guide).

Rodríguez signs his botanical paintings with his two names, and often labels plants and animals in both Muinane and Spanish. While he reasserts the local names that have often been dismissed by Western biologists, this practice also brings into view a much broader relationship between biodiversity, culture, and language. The concept of “biocultural diversity” seeks to describe these profound interconnections; it “comprises the diversity of life in all of its manifestations—biological, cultural, and linguistic—which are interrelated (and likely co-evolved) within a complex socio-ecological adaptive system.”⁶⁸ Traditionally, Rodríguez would have used his knowledge of plants within his own community, passing on through oral transmission what he knew about ecological relationships through cycles of time. His recourse to ink and paper marks an estrangement from the land of his childhood, and testifies to a cultural and linguistic crisis suffered by the Nonuya, Muinane, and other people groups of the area that is also, simultaneously, an ecological crisis. The destruction of habitats in which indigenous groups live—or their expulsion from them—has a disastrous effect on the languages and cultures that are interwoven with those places. The reverse is also true: as Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine remind us, tropical environments need to be managed with the kind of care and knowledge that often only indigenous people are able to provide, with their experience accumulated over hundreds of generations. However, as they affirm, much of this knowledge about local ecosystems “is encoded in indigenous language and rapidly being lost.”⁶⁹ For this reason, “It is not coincidental that language endangerment has gone hand in hand with species endangerment.”⁷⁰

Rodríguez’s illustrations, which are painted from memory, distil a knowledge of biology and ecology that has been passed down through generations and sharpened through patient observation. Unlike classical botanical plates, they place individual species within a broader ecosystem in a way that depicts the natural world as one of continual flux and interaction, in constant conversation with social and spiritual worlds.

A number of Rodríguez’s botanical drawings and observations have been compiled in an open-access digital publication entitled Las plantas cultivadas por la gente de centro en la Amazonia colombiana, produced by Tropenbos Colombia, the Dutch NGO mentioned above.⁷¹ In one chapter, Rodríguez includes illustrations of several different kinds of cassava, a shrub that is traditionally cultivated in the Amazon and a staple of indigenous diets. Each plate typically shows the full-grown shrub, a leaf, seeds, and flowers, as well as the edible root (peeled and unpeeled) and often an animal that feeds on it. As well as aiding the identification of this species, then, Rodríguez gives information about its human and animal uses as a food source. The Yuca brava de sangre, for example, attracts the boruga, a local rodent; the yuca root is brown when harvested but cream-coloured once it has been prepared for cooking (39). The brief texts included in the book also contain information relevant to the sowing and harvesting of plants and their particular value for the community, indicating a medicinal use or identifying which birds come to feed when a tree’s fruit is ripe. The value that is attributed to each plant is therefore one of use rather than exchange, its purpose being to sustain the communities (human and animal) that live in the forest, rather than to generate revenue through trade.

**From *Ciclo anual del bosque de la vega*, by Abel Rodriguez. / Courtesy ResearchGate**

Botanical illustrations produced since the eighteenth century have tended to depict a timeless version of a plant, showing in a single image the different appearances the plant takes on during fruiting and flowering periods. Rodríguez’s work, in contrast, focuses precisely on those changes and how they interact with other cycles in the forest environment. For this reason, many of his illustrations are part of larger series showing an evolution over time. He has created several collections of illustrations that chart the seasonal variations of the Amazon river basin. His Ciclo anual del bosque de la vega (Seasonal Changes in the Flooded Rainforest, 2009–2010; 2015–2016) is a series of twelve ink and watercolour paintings that show how the forest is transformed over the year, as different seasons are marked by rising flood waters, the fruiting of trees, the flowering of bromeliads, and the appearance of certain birds, fish, and mammals.⁷² The periodic flooding of the Amazon basin has created the conditions for unparalleled biodiversity, as floodwaters bring sediments from the Andes to enrich the soil and provide new food sources for animals.

Rodríguez’s illustrations draw out the myriad interrelations that bring this forest-world into being. The cycles of plant and animal lives are interwoven with changes wrought in the terrain by the sun, the moon, and the tides. The particular way that each of these beings draws energy from its milieu and navigates its changing conditions makes other worlds and practices possible. These life forms do not occupy a landscape as if it were some kind of container or backdrop, but actively contribute to its evolution and that of every other living being that inhabits it. In a world of continual flux and entanglement, “living beings of all kinds constitute each other’s conditions for existence,” creating, as the anthropologist Arturo Escobar maintains, “a relational ontology […] in which nothing preexists the relations that constitute it.”⁷³

Another series by Rodríguez published in Las plantas cultivadas por la gente de centro en la Amazonia colombiana describes the Ciclo de la chagra (The Chagra Cycle, 2009), showing in four paintings the successive stages of the cultivation of a community plot. The intricate designs in green and brown ink are accompanied by a key showing the placement of each kind of plant.⁷⁴ They demonstrate the enormous variety of crops grown and the attention paid to how they grow alongside each other, in combinations that allow each to flourish and to be harvested at different points. This cycle has been carefully managed so that each plant receives the right nutrients to mature at the right point, as all crops “tienen su tiempo de ser” (have their time of being).⁷⁵

These are designs, or perhaps more accurately co-designs, that lay out how humans might weave their own practices into the web of coexistences and interrelations through which the forest and its inhabitants are co-constituted. Rodríguez adopts the relational perspective Escobar articulates when he describes the important conversations that take place in the community before work on the chagra is begun: “En ese momento, se habla de la creación, de crear muchas cosas, de cómo crear la chagra y cómo la chagra crea personas” (at that time, we talk about creation, about creating many things, about how to create the chagra and how the chagra creates people).⁷⁶ The people and the plot each come into being as a result of the way that the other comes into being. This understanding contrasts starkly with the kind of knowledge generated by European botanists in the employ of colonial (and neocolonial) states, which has facilitated practices of extraction and exploitation. It also differs markedly from Western discourses of conservation, which promote an illusory vision of an “untouched” nature, affirming instead an alternative form of coexistence between humans and the forest.

The agricultural practices described by Rodríguez are very different from the monocrop farming methods that have led to widespread deforestation across many parts of the world. The chagra is carved out of the forest by felling trees and burning vegetation to produce a layer of fertile ash. This is the method that has been used for millennia to grow crops in the Amazon, where the soil is naturally thin and lacking in nutrients. It creates a plot of land that will be productive for one or two years; after the last crops are harvested, the plot reverts to the wild and a new plot will be cleared in order to start again. Rodríguez explains this process as one of substitution, replacing life with life, wild species with cultivated ones:

Yo no voy a jugar con la selva y mucho menos con los árboles, porque eso tiene vida, yo no voy a destruir por destruir. Así como destruyo la selva tengo que reponer con frutales, así como destruyo la yuca silvestre, tengo que reemplazarla con yuca propia, con otros tubérculos […].⁷⁷

(I am not going to play with the forest and certainly not with trees, because there is life there, and I am not going to destroy for the sake of destroying. If I destroy the forest I have to put fruit trees in its place, if I destroy wild cassava shrubs, I have to replace them with domesticated ones, with other tubers […].)

The chagra is in fact a motor of biodiversity. The act of creating a clearing brings similar benefits to those that are reaped in the natural cycle of the forest when old trees fall and let in light, which leads to a regeneration of the area, as new plants can grow and benefit from nutrients recycled from dead branches.

The chagra depicted in Rodríguez’s work is an example of polyculture, the practice of growing several different crops together. As in many polycultures in Latin America, trees are grown together with crops, providing shade as well as additional nutrients when they shed leaves or fruit, and preventing soil erosion. Polyculture systems are often much more sustainable than other forms of farming. The diversity of crops grown together makes them more resistant to pests and diseases, so they do not require the large amounts of fertilizer and pesticide needed for monocultures. They also share available nutrients more efficiently. Polycultures join a much larger set of strategies that have been grouped under the term “reconciliation ecology.” The term was coined by Michael Rosenzweig in 2003, but some of the practices it involves date back for millennia. Rosenzweig proposes the strategy as a necessary complement to the two more dominant approaches that have been adopted in conservation biology. The first of these, “reservation ecology,” fences off those small and fast-vanishing areas of the world that contain natural habitats. The second, “restoration ecology,” attempts to return areas that have been developed to a more natural state. The problem is that very little land is available for either reservation or restoration. Rosenzweig uses the term “reconciliation ecology” to describe practices that conserve or increase biodiversity in places where humans live and work, using land “in a way that reconciles our needs with those of wild, native species.”⁷⁸

By the third illustration of Rodríguez’s Ciclo de la chagra series, which is entitled Chagra un año (Chagra One Year), the neat rows of plants have become an exuberant tangle. The last, Chagra un año y medio (Chagra One and a Half Years), shows how the plot is already being reclaimed by the forest. Rodríguez describes how trees, lianas and grasses “se van apoderando de todo” (take over everything).⁷⁹ The chagra is a temporary occupation, a parenthesis in the life of the forest, which recolonizes the earth once its human farmers have moved on. And yet of course the forest will not be the same afterwards, as the palm trees and fruit trees will remain for some time, enriching the uncultivated vegetation that grows back around them. The abandoned chagra becomes a rich hunting-ground, as animals are attracted to the plants and trees that remain there. Indeed, ecologists have found that some long-lived tree species in particular may persist in secondary forests in the Amazon for decades or even centuries.⁸⁰

The extent to which humans were already modifying landscapes and transforming biodiversity before the industrial revolution has been significantly underestimated. Nicole L. Boivin and her co-authors argue that “even before the Age of Discovery, cumulative human activities over millennia resulted in dramatic changes to the abundance and geographic range of a diverse array of organisms across taxonomic groups.”⁸¹ It is now known that the Amazon, which has often been viewed as a “pristine” forest, was home to dense populations that modified its soil to make it more fertile and, well before the arrival of the Europeans, produced “large-scale transformations to forest plants, animals, and wetlands” in some areas.⁸² Far from pristine examples of an untouched nature, “Most landscapes are palimpsests shaped by repeated episodes of human activity over multiple millennia.”⁸³ As William M. Denevan puts it, bluntly, “There are no virgin tropical forests today, nor were there in 1492.”⁸⁴ Denevan argues that the wildernesses described and painted by European travellers to Latin America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were an invention, but one that came from a misreading of the landscape that was “in part understandable.”⁸⁵ This was caused by the large-scale demise of indigenous populations between 1492 and 1750 (he estimates that the population of the Americas in 1750 was only thirty percent of its total in 1492). Areas that had been densely populated before European colonization had undergone significant reforestation since that time, such that, by the eighteenth century, they seemed considerably “less humanized” than they had been previously.⁸⁶ More recent studies have shown that forests in Amazonia and elsewhere are “largely anthropogenic in form and composition.”⁸⁷

Focusing on this much longer history of human-led environmental change allows us to understand that not all anthropogenic processes have been catastrophic: human actions have sometimes increased species diversity, especially through controlled fires.⁸⁸ Human disturbance of ecosystems is not necessarily destructive: ecosystems do not evolve to their greatest maturity and highest point of diversity without disturbance, in fact, which may come in natural forms, such as floods or hurricanes, or as a result of human interventions.⁸⁹ It would be a mistake to assume that all indigenous interventions into the landscape have been ecologically beneficial, as this is not the case.⁹⁰ But Rodríguez’s illustrations point to the existence of the kind of mutualist relationships that are central to the sustainable use of forests.

These practices are founded on a radical understanding of how all living beings—including humans—co-constitute each other and their habitats. They are not based on an ontological separation between humans and the rest of nature, which in Western modernity has generated concepts of landscape and environment as depeopled terrains or passive backdrops for human activity. Rodríguez’s illustrations contrast clearly with the forested landscapes painted by travellers to the Amazon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A typical scene, Forêt Vierge du Brésil (Virgin Forest of Brazil, 1819), was painted by the French scholar and artist Comte de Clarac and circulated widely in the form of engravings in Europe. It depicts the diversity of the rainforest, rendered overwhelming in the absence of any horizon or sky. The indigenous figures are, by comparison, tiny; given the title of the painting, one assumes that they do not count as agents with the power to shape their landscape.

In Rodríguez’s illustrations, the entanglement of multiple species does not produce a undifferentiated mass; instead, each species is picked out carefully, drawn in its fullness rather than partly obscured by vegetation, so that it is easily identifiable. The semi-transparent quality of ink is used to draw leaves against trunks, trunks against leaves, in such a way that the identity of each individual form is still visible through and against the dense foliage that surrounds it. As well as documenting the identity of each species woven into the forest system, this method also grants each plant and animal a subjecthood that would be at least partially erased if the scene were depicted realistically from a single (human) perspective. There is no single perspective from which all these species could be visible. This is not a synthesized view of a landscape, in which everything merges together to produce a harmonious effect, or a backdrop for human adventure, but the space of what Escobar might call a “pluriverse,” a world into which many worlds fit.

Rodríguez also renders visible other subjects and actors that have a role in forging the forest world and its cosmovision. In Territorio de Mito (Territory of Myth, 2017), a maloca (communal house) is painted in a small clearing in the dense forest.⁹¹ The labelling of the two human figures nearby as the Sun and the Moon clearly indicates that this is also the scene of a mythical encounter. The donning of human form by nonhuman actors (and vice versa) is a commonplace in Amazonian stories and rituals and points to a very different conception of personhood that is not restricted to the human. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro explains that “The attribution of humanlike consciousness and intentionality (to say nothing of human bodily form and cultural habits) to nonhuman beings has been indifferently denominated ‘anthropocentrism’ or ‘anthropomorphism’,” while in fact these “denote radically opposed cosmological outlooks.”⁹² In this case, the Sun and the Moon are anthropomorphized, but the vision communicated is far from an anthropocentric one: as Viveiros de Castro puts it, “if sundry other beings besides humans are ‘human,’ then we humans are not a special lot.”⁹³ Rodríguez’s painting brings the natural and the spiritual into the social, extending the social beyond the human. De Castro defines animism in this way as “an ontology which postulates the social character of relations between humans and nonhumans.”⁹⁴

The elegant and precise illustrations of botanical species carried out by European and criollo artists and naturalists render plants as objects, as if they existed separately from what they do or independently of their relations with other species and their environment. Indeed, many biological classifications are based on observed structural (or these days, genetic) similarities. Tim Ingold, working at the intersections of anthropology and ecology, finds that “An understanding of the unity of life in terms of genealogical relatedness is bought at the cost of cutting out every single organism from the relational matrix in which it lives and grows.”⁹⁵ How genetically related a species may be to another similar species tells us nothing about how it has co-evolved with other life-forms. Ingold argues that it is stories that “always, and inevitably, draw together what classifications split apart.”⁹⁶ In a “storied world,” we can only understand things as they are brought together in an ongoing field of activity, as “things do not exist, they occur.”⁹⁷ Rodríguez’s botanical illustrations create “storied worlds” in exactly this way, showing how human lives and practices have been shaped by multiple encounters that unfold in a place, binding all things together in a shared history.

In a classic essay of the 1970s on Caribbean literature, Sylvia Wynter distinguished between the values of the plot and those of the plantation, with the former based on use-value and the second on exchange-value. While she recognized that there could be no going back to a society based on “folk culture,” she pointed to its importance in providing “a point outside the system” and “a focus of criticism against the impossible reality in which we are enmeshed.” Although he acknowledges that indigenous models of nature are not unified, Escobar contrasts them with modern Western constructions of nature, with their “strict separation between biophysical, human, and supernatural worlds.” Rodríguez’s illustrations demonstrate the continuity between these spheres, which, as Escobar observes, are “embedded in social relations that cannot be reduced to modern, capitalist terms.”⁹⁸

Conclusion

**Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez / Photo by Soyelmisi1979, Wikimedia Commons**

The Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez refers to the New Granada botanical expedition as a kind of “second conquest,” not executed directly by Europeans but by criollo botanists, their American descendants.⁹⁹ Criollos pursued scientific knowledge in a way that was consonant with their own bid for power. If Linnaeus’s system created controversy among naturalists in Europe at the time, it was also rejected by many criollo scientists in New Spain, for whom its efficiency and claim to universality came at the cost of disregarding local circumstances.¹⁰⁰ These naturalists were much more likely to defend the value of indigenous and local knowledge, and to insist on the importance of biogeography in understanding plant life. José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez (1738–1799) railed against the kind of knowledge that resides in committing plant names to memory rather than understanding their uses.¹⁰¹ Caldas, a key figure in Mutis’s expedition, argued for the radical influence of climate on plants, which he found to be “sujetas a las leyes imperiosas del calor y del frío” (subject to the imperious laws of heat and cold) as well as to many other environmental forces.¹⁰²

As Antonio Lafuente argues, at the core of the many debates that raged over botany in New Spain was the fact that, under imperial politics, botany became “a form of biopolitics” that had little to do with biology and everything to do with the governance of empire.¹⁰³ Rather than understanding the works of Baraya, De Valdenebro, Cardoso, and Rodríguez as twenty-first-century rejections of colonial-era botany, it would be more accurate to see them as an important continuation of historical forms of resistance mounted by criollo naturalists to metropolitan over-simplifications and expropriations. Universal taxonomies are little suited to accounting for change over time or the influence of soil and climate. With the help of more recent research into (co)evolution and historical ecology, these artists’ emphasis on the entanglement of plant histories with other stories—such as those of cultural biodiversity, the domestication of crops, imperial politics, and global capitalism—deepens a critique that had previously been articulated in Spanish America by Alzate, Caldas, and many others.

The work of all four artists discussed in this chapter demonstrate how deeply the plant life we perceive around us has already been transformed by human desires, customs, and cultures. As Pollan suggests, “human desires form a part of natural history in the same way the hummingbird’s love of red does, or the ant’s taste for the aphid’s honeydew.”¹⁰⁴ Although Baraya and De Valdenebro chart the destructive effect of human activity, particularly in the construction of plantations, there is no attempt to promote the conservation of a unspoiled nature, free from human intervention, but instead a desire to understand our integration within it and to promote deeper and more egalitarian forms of encounter. De Valdenebro, Cardoso, and Rodríguez study shared histories that bring together humans and plants in ways that emphasize co-evolution, mutual compenetration, and reciprocity. Not all anthropogenic modifications of other species and the environment have been negative: some have increased the possibility of symbiotic coexistence.

Rodríguez’s work reminds us that human-wrought changes to plant life and landscapes far predate the agricultural revolution. Why is it important to be aware that humans have radically transformed their environment for much longer than we might have thought? Does this not effectively weaken a major strand of decolonial critique that dates the beginning of the Anthropocene to the deadly collusion between colonialism and capitalism, leading to widespread extractivism? I would contend instead that it opens up ways of politicizing and decolonizing the Anthropocene. Firstly, recognizing the extent to which indigenous people have transformed their environments returns to them an ecological agency that they have been denied. The representation of indigenous peoples in the New World as “incapable of making their environments flourish” was part of the historical justification for colonization.¹⁰⁵ Secondly, it helps us to understand that there is nothing inevitable about the West’s dissociative, extractivist relationship with nature, which has led to dominant (unsustainable) forms of agribusiness. Large populations were sustained in pre-Hispanic America with traditional polyculture methods, which—over time—may create higher yields than monocultures.

And thirdly, the deep history of ecological management by indigenous people shifts the terms of the debate: if there is no pristine nature to which we could return, addressing environmental crisis becomes less about the science of how to reconstruct past ecosystems and more about the ethics of what kind of ecosystems we wish to live in in the future. This helps us to contest the “post-politics” of the Anthropocene.¹⁰⁶ It moves us from questions of a purely scientific, technical, and managerial variety to ones of politics, culture and ethics, enabling us to see that our relationship with the natural world is historically and culturally contingent, and therefore open to change. Studying art alongside environmental history and agroecology sharpens our understanding of the depth and importance of that contingency. It helps us grasp the vital connection between biological diversity and cultural diversity—which has been demonstrated empirically—and to imagine new environmental futures that might be shaped by other ways of living on the earth.

Appendix

Endnotes

Nieto Olarte, Remedios para el imperio, 112.
Schiebinger, “Gender and Natural History,” 171.
Linné, Linnaeus’ Philosophia Botanica, 307.
Nieto Olarte, Remedios para el imperio, 12.
Nieto Olarte, 12; Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation.
Bleichmar, Visible Empire, 21.
Nieto Olarte, Remedios para el imperio, 63.
Bleichmar, Visible Empire, 7.
The Expedición Botánica al Virreinato de Nueva Granada covered an area that now comprises Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, parts of northern Peru and northern Brazil, and other smaller states.
Bleichmar, Visible Empire, 67.
Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 59.
Tabatinga is a frontier city in the Brazilian Amazon, located on the border with Colombia.
See http://www.rjb.csic.es/icones/mutis/paginas/laminadibujo.php?lamina=2875
Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 37.
Pratt, 31.
Uribe Uribe, “Los maestros pintores,” 102.
Latour, “Visualisation and Cognition,” 12.
Latour, 30.
Mendoza, Expedición botánica de José Celestino Mutis al Nuevo Reino de Granada, 80, 77.
In the wake of the protests that followed George Floyd’s death, Nestlé announced that it would rename the sweets as part of a broader review of racialized product names. Gretler and Whitley, “Nestle Pulls Beso de Negra, Red Skins Candy in Racial Review.”
Quijano and Wallerstein, “Americanity as a Concept,” 550–51.
Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina,” 221.
Quijano and Wallerstein, “Americanity as a Concept,” 549.
Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina,” 221.
Sarduy, “The Baroque and the Neobaroque,” 288.
Deleuze, The Fold, 137.
Bleichmar, Visible Empire, 83, 91.
See https://www.eulaliadevaldenebro.com/paramo.html
Conversation with the author, 20 April 2022.
See https://www.eulaliadevaldenebro.com/paramo.html
See https://www.eulaliadevaldenebro.com/paramo.html
Svampa and Viale, El colapso ecológico ya llegó, 256.
See https://www.eulaliadevaldenebro.com/heterogeneas.html
Grupo de Investigación en Derechos Colectivos y Ambientales (GIDC), Colombia, “El despojo de la propiedad intelectual a través del Convenio UPOV 91.”
Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, 2:406.
Purugganan and Fuller, “The Nature of Selection during Plant Domestication,” 843.
Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, 2:412–13.
Páramos constitute a neotropical high-altitude ecosystem of exceptional biodiversity. They are found along the Andean mountain range, and especially in Colombia.
See https://www.eulaliadevaldenebro.com/fraile2.html
Conversation with the author, 20 April 2022.
Conversation with the author, 20 April 2022.
https://www.eulaliadevaldenebro.com/fraile2.html
See https://www.eulaliadevaldenebro.com/mapa2.html
https://www.eulaliadevaldenebro.com/mapa2.html
Conversation with the author, 20 April 2022.
De Valdenebro, “CUERPOPERMEABLE: Conocer el páramo en el cuerpo,” 135.
Linné, Linnaeus’ Philosophia Botanica, 282.
Linné, 282.
Linné, 251.
Cardoso, “The Aesthetics of Reproductive Morphologies,” 39, 30.
Human non Human, curated by Katie Dyer and Lizzie Muller, was exhibited between 7 August 2018 and 27 January 2019 at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia.
Cardoso, “The Aesthetics of Reproductive Morphologies,” 11, 56.
Linné, Prelude to the Betrothal of Plants, 81.
Linné, Linnaeus’ Philosophia Botanica, 105.
Linnaeus, Systema Naturae. Facsimile of the First Edition, n.p.; see also Schiebinger, “Gender and Natural History,” 167.
See Fara, Sex, Botany, and Empire, 11–12; Müller-Wille, “Linnaeus and the Love Lives of Plants,” 309.
Schiebinger, “Gender and Natural History,” 165.
Linné, Diaeta naturalis, 1733: Linnés tankar om ett naturenligt levnadssätt, 109; cit. Müller-Wille, “Linnaeus and the Love Lives of Plants,” 311.
Conversation with the author, 27 April 2022.
Schiebinger, “Gender and Natural History,” 165.
Eriksson, “Linnaeus the Botanist,” 104–5.
The text was written by curators Katie Dyer and Lizzie Muller. See https://mariafernandacardoso.com/documentaries/nature-in-art/on-the-marriages-of-
plants-at-human-no-human/
Pollan, The Botany of Desire, xiv.
Dyer and Muller, “Objects, Energies and Curating Resonance across Disciplines,” 257, 258.
Coccia, The Life of Plants, 53, 5, 37.
Cardoso, “Matrimonio entre ciencia y arte,” 180.
Dirección de Poblaciones del Ministerio de Cultura, “Estudios de la lengua Nonuya.”
Maffi and Woodley, Biocultural Diversity Conservation, 5.
Nettle and Romaine, Vanishing Voices, 166.
Nettle and Romaine, 14.
Rodríguez, Las plantas cultivadas por la gente de centro en la Amazonia colombiana. The volume may be downloaded via this link: http://tropenboscol.org/recursos/publicaciones/the+plants+cultivated+by+the+people+from+the+center+in+the+colombian+amazon
The 2015–2016 series may be viewed online at https://www.banrepcultural.org/coleccion-de-arte/obra/ciclo-anual-del-bosque-de-vega-12-ap6170
Escobar, Pluriversal Politics, 71–72.
Rodríguez, 18–21; 24–27.
Rodríguez, 50.
Rodríguez, 10.
Rodríguez, 12.
Rosenzweig, Win-Win Ecology, 1, 7.
Rodríguez, Las plantas cultivadas por la gente de centro en la Amazonia colombiana, 23.
Clement, McCann, and Smith, “Agrobiodiversity in Amazônia and Its Relationship with Dark Earths,” 172.
Boivin et al., “Ecological Consequences of Human Niche Construction,” 6388–89.
Boivin et al., 6392.
Boivin et al., 6393.
Denevan, “The Pristine Myth,” 375.
Denevan, 379–80.
Denevan, 371.
Denevan, 373.
Balee, “The Research Program of Historical Ecology,” 77.
Balee, 81–82.
Denevan notes that indigenous changes to the landscape were not always “benign” and resources were not always used in a “sound ecological way,” but their impact was certainly not “localized” or “ephemeral.” Denevan, “The Pristine Myth,” 370.
The work may be viewed at https://institutodevision.com/visionarios/abel-rodriguez/
Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native, 245.
Viveiros de Castro, 245.
Viveiros de Castro, 232.
Ingold, Being Alive, 163.
Ingold, 160 (original emphasis).
Ingold, 160.
Escobar, “Whose Knowledge, Whose nature?,” 61.
Castro-Gómez, La hybris del punto cero, 214. Apart from Mutis himself (who had been living in the region for almost thirty years), all the scientists and artists who took part in the expedition were criollos. Castro-Gómez, 214n28.
Lafuente and Valverde, “Colonial Botany,” 136.
Alzate y Ramírez, “Carta satisfactoria dirigida a un literato por don José de Alzate,” 21–23.
Caldas, “Del influjo del clima sobre los seres organizados,” 89–90, 119.
Lafuente and Valverde, “Colonial Botany,” 141.
Pollan, The Botany of Desire, xvi.
Rivera-Núñez, Fargher, and Nigh, “Toward an Historical Agroecology,” 294.
Swyngedouw, “Depoliticized Environments,” 266. See the discussion of the “post-political” nature of the Anthropocene in this book’s introduction.

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Chapter 3: Floras, Herbaria, and Botanical Illustration, 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.