A Flora of Many Histories

What becomes visible when different ways of naming, knowing, and seeing a plant are brought into relation?

A Flora of Many Histories is an ongoing photographic and material investigation into the relationships between botanical representation, memory, and territory. Drawing on botanical archives associated with Martius and Spix’s expedition through Brazil (1817–1820), the series explores how the living world has been observed, classified, and translated into images. These records carry both scientific knowledge and the hierarchies through which colonial ways of seeing took shape.

Historical botanical illustrations are placed alongside my contemporary photographs of corresponding plants, creating encounters between different times and forms of attention. Their arrangement holds these perspectives in tension, inviting the viewer to move between the precision of the botanical plate, the particular presence of the photographed plant, and the histories surrounding both. The juxtaposition of Indigenous, Brazilian common, and scientific names extends this inquiry into language, revealing how a plant can belong to different systems of knowledge, use, and memory.

As a Brazilian artist, I approach these archives from a present still shaped by their ways of organizing the world. My own gaze enters this relationship as another situated perspective. The work grows from a desire to reconsider familiar plants through the histories that intersect around them, attending to the limits of what an image or a name can contain.

The images are printed on contrasting papers and assembled by hand on raw cotton dyed with plant materials. Colors derived from local flora embed the material presence of the landscape into each work, grounding the research in the environment itself. Here, nature is neither a passive backdrop nor a reserve of materials; it participates in history, the body, and the production of memory.

Cuts, stitches, and visible fixings make the construction of each composition perceptible. The fabric becomes a surface where images, materials, and temporalities meet. Each work takes shape as a unique physical object and is subsequently photographed, allowing the series to circulate through both its material originals and their photographic representations.

The title suggests a botanical inventory open to overlapping and sometimes conflicting histories. As the research continues, each new work adds another relation between plants, images, names, and the territories they inhabit. How can a photograph hold these histories together while allowing their differences to remain visible?