Counter-Herbarium: Colonial Botany, Afro-Diasporic Memory, and Ecological Archives in Modern and Contemporary Art
Project description;
To investigate how modern and contemporary Afro-diasporic artists reinterpret colonial botanical archives as sites of memory reconstruction, ecological critique, and decolonial resistance.
This research study investigates how modern and contemporary Afro-diasporic artists reconstruct and contest colonial botanical archives in order to reveal the ecological foundations of empire and the enduring afterlives of plantation modernity. The project examines how botanical imagery, seed migration, herbarium collections, and plantation ecologies function as visual and material archives of colonial violence, forced migration, and racial capitalism.
The study introduces the concept of the “counter-herbarium” to describe artistic practices that disrupt imperial taxonomies and reassemble botanical histories through decolonial visual strategies. Combining archival research, exhibition analysis, ecological humanities, and visual culture studies, the project analyzes the relationship between colonial science and contemporary art across transatlantic networks linking the Caribbean, Britain, Africa, and the Americas.
The study develops the concept of:
“Counter-Herbarium”
Defined as:
a decolonial visual and archival practice through which artists reconstruct suppressed ecological histories by destabilizing colonial systems of botanical classification and representation.
The Mediterranean and Atlantic as Postcolonial Spaces in Modern and Contemporary Art
Project description;
This project examines how contemporary artists use the Mediterranean and Atlantic to address the enduring legacies of colonialism, slavery, migration, and cultural exchange, revealing new perspectives on memory, displacement, identity, resistance, and historical accountability.
The Mediterranean and Atlantic have historically served as crucial routes of trade, conquest, forced migration, and cultural encounter. Their histories are deeply entangled with colonial networks that connected Europe, Africa, the Americas, and the Middle East. In contemporary art, these waters continue to emerge as contested terrains through which artists address questions of identity, belonging, borders, mobility, environmental change, and historical memory. The project investigates how artistic practices challenge dominant historical narratives and reveal alternative perspectives on interconnected colonial and postcolonial histories.
Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from art history, postcolonial studies, visual culture, migration studies, and critical geography, the research focuses on artists whose work engages with maritime imaginaries, diasporic experiences, transnational networks, and decolonial methodologies. Through the analysis of artworks, exhibitions, archives, and cultural institutions, the project considers how artistic production contributes to new understandings of historical trauma, collective memory, and cultural hybridity across these regions. Particular attention will be given to contemporary case studies, including Isaac Julien’s film installation Western Union: Small Boats (2007), which examines migration routes across the Mediterranean; John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (2015), a multi-screen work connecting the Atlantic Ocean to histories of slavery, migration, and ecological crisis; and Yto Barrada’s photographic and film-based projects on Tangier, which explore border regimes, mobility, and the lingering effects of colonial and postcolonial transformations in the Mediterranean region.
Particular attention is given to themes such as the transatlantic slave trade, colonial cartographies, migration across the Mediterranean, Black Atlantic cultural formations, Indigenous and diasporic knowledge systems, and the environmental dimensions of maritime histories. By bringing the Mediterranean and Atlantic into dialogue, the project highlights shared histories while also acknowledging their distinct political and cultural contexts.
Ultimately, the project seeks to contribute to current debates on decolonization, global art histories, and transregional methodologies. It demonstrates how maritime perspectives can illuminate the continuing influence of imperial histories on contemporary artistic practice and critical engagements with the past and present.
Naturally Hypernatural
together with the School of Visual Arts, NYC
Nature is booming. If one looks at the latest trends in contemporary art or even at the major international art events that have dominated the last two years (documenta, Biennale, Ars Electronica), an "appearance" shows a dominance of "nature" in a striking way; equally, however, its manifestations are radically new. And this is interesting, because a connection of "nature" and "art" seems to be nothing new. All the more not in the 20th century, which is dominated in many ways by artistic practices, techniques, strategies, materials that use nature.
Entangled Histories Alternative Descriptions of Modernities and the Contemporary in History and Self-Conception
Under the aspect of aesthetics, it is a matter of exploring how and with which manifestations embodiment occurs at all. The aspect of aisthesis aims to clarify how something can be sensually experienced and felt, and how this process can in turn be perceived. Medium is negotiated for this research project in two perspectives: first, we understand the senses as a 'place of passage', that is, as a medium - to show that it is precisely sensory experience "whereby objects exist in the first place" (Maurice Merleau-Ponty: 1994, p. 51). However, we then take this classical phenomenological approach, as first articulated by Merleau-Ponty, further to explain the importance of the arts for understanding theories of embodiment: for us, medium is not only the senses themselves that enable an understanding of the world, but they are in turn tied to media of embodiment, such as objects, scenes, and scenarios of art.
Aesthetics, Aisthesis and Media of Embodiment
The project Aesthetics, Aisthesis and Media of Embodiment aims to close a desideratum in the discussion about embodiment. Although the research conducted in this framework has provided important insights into embodiment processes, it has not yet been able to show fundamentally what embodiment is. Current research on embodiment therefore urgently needs the development and application of a methodology that is phenomenologically grounded and based on art and art studies. This is to be realized within the framework of the project. Explicitly under the aspect of aesthetics, the aim is to explore how and with which manifestations embodiment occurs at all. The aspect of aisthesis is to clarify how something can be sensually experienced and felt and how this process can in turn be perceived. Aesthetics and aisthesis will serve as guiding categories for the project to understand what thinking means at all. With the new research approach to be developed, and thus through new research methodologies that the project will develop, it might become possible to understand embodiment fundamentally and in all its complexity.
Publications:
Sabine Flach, Jan Söffner (eds.): Habitus in Habitat II - Other Sides of Cognition, Peter Lang, 2010
