But Why Tarnish the Beauty of a Flower
But Why Tarnish the Beauty of a Flower uses recorded attempts to virtually access and experience botanical gardens and glasshouses via Googlemaps combined with 3D scans from Kew Gardens, to consider the colonial histories of these sites.
The video emerged from an online residency with 11:11 Residency in 2022, looking into botanical histories and the extraction and commodification of plants through the legacies of plant hunters. The archive page can be seen here.
The botanical sciences that developed in the 17th and 18th century were a project for the ordering, visualising, labelling and categorizing of life that feeds into the continued stratification and hierarchies of bodies. There was an established assumption of landscape and plants as passive and inactive matter.
Growing from an interest in these sites that impose a surreal and static power over a clean, curated display of ‘nature’ and wondering what ends up in the compost, the piece touches on the mapping, movement and categorisation of plants and their values. Considering the accompanying tensions between preservation, extraction and adaptability prompts questions of what botanical gardens might function as and what plants might look like in the future.
Full video screening soon at SLQS Gallery Screening Room 8-30 April 2024 – https://www.slqsgallery.com/