| Description |
This publication emerges from Uriel Orlow's Theatrum Botanicum (2015-18), a multi-faceted project encompassing film, sound, photography, and installation that looks to the botanical world as a stage for politics. Working from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe, the project considers plants as both witnesses to, and dynamic agents in, history. It links nature and humans, rural and cosmopolitan medicine, tradition and modernity across different geographies, histories, and systems of knowledge-exploring the variety of curative, spiritual, and economic powers of plants. The project addresses 'botanical nationalism' and 'flower diplomacy' during apartheid; plant migration; the role and legacies of the imperial classification and naming of plants; bioprospecting and biopiracy; and the garden planted by Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates at Robben Island prison. |