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Cover design: Studio Bens based on a photograph of a banana plant from Costa Rica, 14.7 x 24.3 cm. Photo: The Bookworm Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.
Cover design: Studio Bens based on a photograph of a banana plant from Costa Rica, 14.7 x 24.3 cm. Photo: The Bookworm Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.

Abstract

Starting with artist and curator Pablo León de la Barra’s poster Diagrama Tropical/Nova Cartografia Tropical (2010), I chart visualizations of the histories of art that use the tree as a metaphor, privileging a perspective ‘from the tropics’. Western visual art canonizations in the mid-twentieth century, such as those created by Miguel Covarrubias, Alfred Barr, and Ad Reinhardt, referred to representations of the evolution of the arts, which were intrinsically interwoven with colonialist aesthetic — and botanical — discourses. At around the same time, in an effort to respond to and expand such Western ‘trees of art’ from the perspective of the Global South, Latin American and Caribbean artists invented visualization practices that ‘tropicalized’ traditional tree and cartography forms. Tropical vegetation in the arts thus helped me to think of ‘tropicalization’ as a method of worlding art history canons. I question paradigms of art historiography dealing with ongoing epistemological coloniality visualized and hierarchized in the plant metaphor, and discuss ‘tropicalizing’ artistic and art historiographical positions expressed through tropical trees and plants, such as those by Tarsila do Amaral, Hélio Oiticica, Rosana Paulino, and the Devenir Universidad team with Inga researchers and Ursula Biemann, among others.

Keywords: tropicalization, diagram, tree chart, Southern epistemologies, worlding practices

Diagrama Tropical

The curator Pablo León de la Barra’s 2010 poster, Diagrama Tropical/Nova Cartografia Tropical (Tropical Diagram/New Tropical Cartography), depicts a banana stalk in black and white. Rendered as a flat surface, each banana is contoured with a thick black outline (Figure 1).1 Laden with an abundance of small bananas, the fruiting head is detached from the plant that has produced it and thus seems to hover enigmatically in the pictorial space. Abstract shadows and granular, darker patches emerge from the white background. At first glance, de la Barra’s monumentalized bananeiro (portuguese for banana plant) offers a possible formal allusion to a style of poster-making used in advertising that was favoured by the New Objectivity art movement in the Weimar Republic. Here, the ‘product’, frequently an ‘exotic’ food item being introduced to European consumers, was removed from any cultural or political context in order to generate an impression of monumentality. While this resonates with de la Barra’s use of strong contours, this is not the only historical reference that Diagrama Tropical makes. In the poster, a miniature silhouette of a leafy branch is placed in the upper right-hand corner, and in the lower left-hand corner is a section of climbing twine. By using this arrangement, de la Barra also gestures to forms of early scientific illustrations that often depicted various parts of plants next to one another. An example of this is the Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (Transformations of Surinamese Insects) developed by the artist, botanist, and entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian at the turn of the eighteenth century, (Figure 2), which demonstrates the practice of illustrating every part of a plant as a way of detailing visual knowledge of the specimen.2

Figure 1. Pablo León de la Barra, Diagrama Tropical/Nova Cartografia Tropical, 2010, poster, digital print on paper.
Figure 1. Pablo León de la Barra, Diagrama Tropical/Nova Cartografia Tropical, 2010, poster, digital print on paper.
Figure 2. After Maria Sibylla Merian, Pieter Sluyter (engraver), Inflorescence of Banana, 1705, hand-coloured etching and engraving, 39.37 x 28.58 cm. From Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, first published 1705. Photo credit: The Minnich Collection The Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Fund, 1966.
Figure 2. After Maria Sibylla Merian, Pieter Sluyter (engraver), Inflorescence of Banana, 1705, hand-coloured etching and engraving, 39.37 x 28.58 cm. From Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, first published 1705. Photo credit: The Minnich Collection The Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Fund, 1966.

In the same vein, de la Barra subdivides the tree’s body into a conglomeration of parts into which he writes terms and expressions related to the idea of ‘tropical art’. Rather than providing scientific nomenclature, however, his individual bananas, alongside the stalk, contain names of artists, collectives, individual works, and even popular forms of dance such as salsa, among others.3 The lower half of the composition includes older figures such as Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian botanical geographer and traveller in the Americas, as well as the anthropologist and structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss who wrote an anthropological travel memoir titled Tristes Tropiques (1955),4 and the early modern Dutch painter Albert Eckhout who travelled to Brazil to record the country’s landscape, inhabitants, flora, and fauna. In each of their respective professional works, the figure of the banana appears as the ultimate emblem of the imagined tropics.5 Shifting away from these historical references, de la Barra also illustrates a strip of nine bananas, which runs from left to right roughly in the middle of the poster, each containing just a single letter: ‘D-I-T-A-D-U-R-A-S’, which translates as ‘dictatorships’ in English. This offers a striking reminder of the impact Latin American dictatorships have had on culture and art. De la Barra contrasts this in the upper half of the composition with names of key cultural figures from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These include the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam with his seminal work La Jungla (The Jungle) (1943), the Brazilian poet and novelist Oswald de Andrade with his Manifesto Antropófago (The Anthropophagic Manifesto) (1928),6 and the artists Hélio Oiticica, Chemi Rosado, and Wilfredo Prieto, among many others. Seeing all these names and references alongside one another, de la Barra’s tree offers a personal interpretation of the genealogy of Latin American art history, and also emphasizes how Latin American and Caribbean artists from the early twentieth century onwards have pursued inventive visualization practices to formulate ‘Southern’ responses to Western canons, particularly as they have been illustrated via the metaphor of the tree diagram in works by artists such as Miguel Covarrubias, Alfred Barr, and Ad Reinhardt.7

Presenting the popular tree metaphor and adapting it into a ‘tropicalized’ form, as well as using the over-semanticized iconography of the tropical plant has enabled de la Barra and numerous other Latin American and Caribbean artists to re-appropriate the colonial categorization of flora native to the Americas. The artistic reclaiming of the indigenous flora makes all the more sense because, as I aim to show in this chapbook, the colonial project of categorizing and naming plants went hand in hand with early modern art practices. Indeed, some of the artists mentioned in de la Barra’s diagram — and discussed in more detail below — employed the tropicalized tree metaphor and cartographies to challenge entrenched notions of straightforward, evolutionist development and linearity in the historiography of arts and culture. Instead, their works highlighted how canonical uses of the ‘tree’ form to visualize linear Western art historiography were often bound to a particular idea of cultural nourishment; namely, that Western geographies form the ‘roots’ from which specific art manifestations ‘grow’.

In what follows, I begin with the example of Diagrama Tropical and then delve into the history of tree diagrams and plant metaphors used by European thinkers to visualize evolutionary schemes of scientific knowledge and art history, particularly in discussions about modern art. I then proceed to examine tropicalizing or ‘worlding’ tree and plant imagery conceived as an artistic expression of inversion, emancipation, and the construction of new tropical histories and visual historiographies from the perspective of Latin America. In conclusion, I outline theoretical implications of tropicalization, and propose how they could shape ‘worlded’ approaches to the study of art history and historiography more generally, so that they shift away from linear accounts.

Tropicality in the Arts and Visual Culture

Tropicality can be understood very differently depending on one’s discursive and geographic perspective on ‘the tropics’. British historian David Arnold deployed the term ‘tropicality’ to ‘denote a potent discourse that constructs the tropical world as the West’s environmental Other’.8 Analogous to the notion of ‘Orientalism’ as established by Edward Said in his seminal 1978 book, Orientalism, Arnoldian tropicalism is a discursively produced imaginary landscape. Its meaning and significance are controlled through a system of representation; as such, the tropics ‘need to be understood as a conceptual, and not just physical, space’.9 Tropicality may thus be ‘conceived as a discourse — or complex of Western ideas, attitudes, knowledges, and experiences’,10 related to or projected onto the so-called tropical regions, the geographical areas adjacent to the equator in the Pacific, South, and Central America, and Africa.11 Extrapolating from Arnold, one may approach the tropics as a category invented to visually describe the ‘other’ embedded in an image of lush vegetation, sweltering humidity, and land scarcely touched by cultivation: ‘Yet whether viewed as the exotic site of a noble innocence and simplicity that the West has lost, or as a fertile yet primitive estate awaiting the civilising and modernising intervention of the West, the tropics have been affixed to Western frameworks of meaning, desire and knowledgeable manipulation.’12

The regions designated as the ‘tropics’ are by no means geographically specific, such that in effect the Caribbean, Polynesia, and the rainforest regions of central Africa are merged into an expansive aesthetic category.13 Marcus Termeer, a German researcher and author on nature-culture relations, has described how the Global North’s14 perspective on and ensuing imagination of the tropics has passed through three historical stages:

In the early phase of the ‘conquest’, these territories appear to be labyrinthine, confusing to the senses, and menacingly female. […] As a result of taxonomic botany, which is supposed to enable theoretical mastery over the vegetation, and the geographical exploration of hitherto ‘other worlds’, in around 1800 an ‘Arcadian’ phase commences, for which Humboldt’s travels and studies are exemplary. The ‘tropical’ terrains now serve as equivalents to cultivated landscape gardens and painting. […] Then, in the mid-nineteenth century, the ‘tropical’ and its growth are perceived differently. Now a menacingly ‘rampant growth that is unhealthy’, it is associated with a ‘fear of degeneration, exhaustion, and wastefulness hostile to life’, so that the potent and wild proliferation of flora, which is simultaneously sapping vitality, appears to be a fruitless, merely vegetative reproduction, or indeed infertility.15

With its banana motif, de la Barra’s poster evokes various ways in which the tropical has been represented in Western art history.16 As described earlier, the poster alludes to illustrations that sought to classify and impose order onto an ‘other’ or ‘new’ world, which was perceived at the time as being overwhelming and chaotic through the very richness of its floral diversity. De la Barra signals the various ways in which representations of bananas in art and visual culture have for centuries been intrinsically tied to colonial and neo-colonial structures of exploitation.17 Take, for example, the Dutch Baroque painter Albert Eckhout. After the Dutch established a colony in Brazil in 1636, he was a member of governor Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen’s entourage that travelled the following year, and took part in a Dutch West India scientific expedition to Brazil between 1637 and 1644. In one of his paintings, Tupinamba Woman with Child (1641) (Figure 3), Eckhout draws parallels between the ‘wild’ state of a Brazilian Tupi woman and a banana tree.18 The banana stalk, with its rough and browning leaves, functions as an ambivalent sign: it could indicate the native origins of this Indigenous woman, while also reducing her to the role of a mere labourer in this plantation-based economy — the plantation is featured in the background in an idealized way, with rows of trees being tended to in the garden of a very grand house.

Figure 3. Albert Eckhout, Tupinamba Woman with Child, 1641, oil on canvas, 274 x 163 cm, Nationaalmuseet, Copenhagen.
Figure 3. Albert Eckhout, Tupinamba Woman with Child, 1641, oil on canvas, 274 x 163 cm, Nationaalmuseet, Copenhagen.

As demonstrated by Eckhout’s painting, such colonial representations of nature found form in art in order to domesticate ‘exotic’ vegetation by classifying, ordering, and arranging it.19 In the plantation economies of Central America and the Caribbean, the banana has had an emblematic place in the structures of neo-colonial exploitation.20 This has been the case particularly since the United Fruit Company and other global corporations expanded their transportation networks during the nineteenth century. By virtue of this, many of these could operate like imperial powers by exploiting workers, land, and legal structures through extractive and for-profit methods. Since such developments in the nineteenth century, the term ‘banana republic’ has come to describe corrupt governments or the private exploitation of public assets.21 Likewise, the adjacent term ‘banana wars’ anchors a series of massacres committed against labourers, human rights violations, and the extractive exploitation of nature in the collective memory of Central America and beyond.22 Simultaneously, the banana has become the very epitome of a tropical imaginary in popular and mass culture.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the banana plant was associated with readily obtainable ‘tropical’ sexuality, as exemplified in the Bananina poster (Figure 4), an advertisement for banana flour that was published in the German Empire in 1905. An alluring woman wears a feathered skirt and matching headpiece, while rising out of banana plant foliage, entwined with nature. Her genitals are in the same area as the plant’s pistil, essentially becoming an organ of botanic reproduction.23 In the 1920s, Josephine Baker — the well-known Black American-French dancer, singer, and actress — epitomized erotic exoticism by wearing an alluring skirt made of bananas, at once domesticating these exotic signs and making them available for consumption.24 The Brazilian singer and dancer Carmen Miranda turned the fruit hat into an erotically-charged sign and, with it, elevated herself as a brand in her own right,25 which the Chiquita Banana Company appropriated and transformed into the now iconic ‘Miss Chiquita’ logo. Thus, the banana — at this stage a popular consumer product that had come to epitomize Western imperialistic prosperity — was allegorized as a feminine personification of the banana form, embellishing the phallic shape with an attractive, though salacious, pair of human legs.26 These examples show how, in the words of Samantha A. Noël, ‘the tropics along with the values the term connoted in the West’, were long ‘considered antithetical to the European models of civilization, industrialization, and progress’.27 At the same time, the formal appropriation of tropical sujets (subjects) and iconographies by Western modernist avant-gardes demonstrated socioeconomic status and innovative taste, particularly in the realm of interior design and popular culture.28

Figure 4. German advertisement for banana flour, made by the Bananina brand in Havana, Cuba by Ramón Crusellas company, 1905. Photo: Tobias Scholze.
Figure 4. German advertisement for banana flour, made by the Bananina brand in Havana, Cuba by Ramón Crusellas company, 1905. Photo: Tobias Scholze.

Visual Histories of Evolution

Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (Encyclopaedia) (1751–80) is considered a foundational work in the categorization, ordering, and construction of knowledge based on Eurocentric, nationalist, patriarchal, and classicist standards and values.29 On a structural level it undoubtedly heralded — in the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment in France — the advent of an egalitarian knowledge system. In stark contrast to earlier atlases that were organized around subjectively assigned meanings and their perceived importance,30 Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie was among the first works to introduce the ‘neutral’ alphabetical ordering system and to use an objective search criterion without assigned meanings.31 This new ordering system is also evident in Distribution Généalogique des Sciences et des Arts Principaux (Genealogical Distribution of the Principal Arts and Sciences) (1780) (Figure 5). However, the form of this tree is based perhaps on a deciduous beech stemming from a temperate climate zone. As such, it deviates fundamentally from the anatomy of a typical tree with roots, a trunk, and foliage. Here, different examples of science and the arts are written into medallions that double as leaves. These do not follow a linear progression, but rather begin at the trunk and form a dense collection of leaves that ultimately resemble a bush more than a tree of knowledge.32

Figure 5. Robert Benard (engraver), Genealogical Distribution of the Principal Arts and Sciences, 1780, 98.5 x 63.5 cm. Published as a fold-out frontispiece in volume 1 of Pierre Mouchon, Table analytique et raisonnée des matieres contenues dans les XXXIII volumes in-folio du Dictionnaire des sciences, des arts et des métiers, et dans son supplement (Paris: Panckoucke, 1780).
Figure 5. Robert Benard (engraver), Genealogical Distribution of the Principal Arts and Sciences, 1780, 98.5 x 63.5 cm. Published as a fold-out frontispiece in volume 1 of Pierre Mouchon, Table analytique et raisonnée des matieres contenues dans les XXXIII volumes in-folio du Dictionnaire des sciences, des arts et des métiers, et dans son supplement (Paris: Panckoucke, 1780).

The construction of scientific knowledge through categorization and classification of ‘foreign’ plants and natural phenomena also underpinned the research of the German geographer, naturalist, and ‘explorer’, Alexander von Humboldt. This is evident in the descriptions of his voyage to the southern regions of the Americas, from 1799 to 1804.33 For Humboldt and his partner Aimé Bonpland, text and image were not to be kept distinct and separate from knowledge and its visualization; science, ethics, and aesthetics formed an interrelated whole.34 It is in this spirit that the title of his 1807 Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pflanzen nebst einem Naturgemälde der Tropenländer associates a ‘geography of plants’ with a ‘nature painting’.35 The interwoven relationship between aesthetic perception, a ‘sense for art’, and scientific observation are discussed early on in the text:

But the individual who has a feeling for the beauty of nature is delighted to also find therein the solution to some moral and aesthetic problems. What influence has the distribution of plants across the face of the earth, and the beholding of the same, had on the imagination and the appreciation of art amongst the various peoples? […] These investigations are all the more interesting because they are directly connected to the mysterious means through which landscape painting and, in part, even descriptive poetic art, bring forth their effect.36

The banana plant is elevated in Humboldt’s description to be not only a sign of tropical vegetation per se, but also the ultimate symbol of the ‘tropical’ as an aesthetic category in artistic representation.37 Responding to Humboldt’s rich descriptive language, the German painter Friedrich Georg Weitsch accordingly portrayed Humboldt in 1806 sitting in front of a banana tree (Figure 6). He is depicted holding a book about plant studies on his lap. Leaf tips emerge from its pages, reflecting Humboldt’s identity as a collector of specimens and seeds from numerous plants unknown in the West.38 Weitsch’s painting even goes one step further, offering a contrast between the Prussian naturalist’s glistening forehead and immaculately clean clothing, and the idealized and seemingly uninhabited background ‘jungle’ scene, which, in its gloomy darkness, could be said to represent the mystery of the unknown. In a final gesture, Weitsch signed his own name beneath Humboldt’s sitting place, as if the letters were etched into the earth; in this sense, the ‘cultural achievement’ of art can be read as overwriting the ‘natural’ composition of the world, literally stamping an indelible impression on it.39

Figure 6. Friedrich Georg Weitsch, Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt, 1806, oil on canvas, 126 x 92.5 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv.-Nr. A II 828. Courtesy of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie. Photo: Karin März.
Figure 6. Friedrich Georg Weitsch, Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt, 1806, oil on canvas, 126 x 92.5 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv.-Nr. A II 828. Courtesy of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie. Photo: Karin März.

Humboldt’s representation of the tropics through vegetation finds a parallel in the naturalist Ernst Haeckel’s visualizations of evolutionary history in the form of a genealogical tree printed in 1874 in Anthropogenie oder Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen (Anthropogeny or History of the Evolution of Mankind) (Figure 7). Humboldt and Haeckel shared ideas of cultural development and a holistic vision that spanned both epistemological truths and aesthetic presentation. In his illustration, Haeckel depicts the history of human evolution through a tree that has shed its leaves. The tree resembles an oak, which in the second half of the nineteenth century was considered to epitomize the idealized notion of German nationhood.40 Made famous by the exploits and writings of the naturalist and biologist Charles Darwin and popularized by Haeckel, evolution is presented here as the history of genetic-civilizing progress, from the ‘simplest’ living organisms (visualized at the base of the tree) and proceeding through a series of increasingly complex living creatures and animals all the way to ‘man’ (positioned high up in the crown of the tree, at the point closest to the sky).41

Figure 7. Ernst Haeckel and Anst. v. J.C. Bach (lithographer), Stammbaum des Menschen (Family Tree of Man), 1874, lithograph reproduced and printed in Anthropogenie oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen: gemeinverständliche wissenschaftliche Vorträge über die Grundzüge der menschlichen Keimes- und Stammes-Geschichte (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1874), plate XII.
Figure 7. Ernst Haeckel and Anst. v. J.C. Bach (lithographer), Stammbaum des Menschen (Family Tree of Man), 1874, lithograph reproduced and printed in Anthropogenie oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen: gemeinverständliche wissenschaftliche Vorträge über die Grundzüge der menschlichen Keimes- und Stammes-Geschichte (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1874), plate XII.

Haeckel’s work also implies the unity of nature and art, as well as science and aesthetics, which is demonstrated in great detail in the folio Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature). The meticulous drawings of lichen, radiolarians, and box jellyfish are at once aesthetically captivating and biologically educational, and together they represent a visual rendering of Darwin’s theory of descent. Published in several sets between 1899 and 1904, the print editions were popular among Europe’s educated middle classes. They represented evolution as advancing from a ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ stage, and delineated the occidental notion of progress through the form of the tree, whereby numerous genealogical and family trees reflected processes of ‘natural’ selection and the progress of civilization. In particular, the Tree of Jesse is often depicted as being one of the most important trees. Indeed, from the period of the Middle Ages on, Jesus was positioned as a direct descendant of the Biblical kings — from Jesse, who was the father of David, the king and second ruler of the United Kingdom of Ancient Israel and Judea. For example, a stone carving titled The Tree of Jesse, which can be found in St. Peter’s Cathedral in the city of Worms in southern Germany, sees a root that winds and curves around various Biblical figures, including Jesus and Jesse. In doing so, it illustrates the interconnecting aspects of the Old and New Testaments, both in terms of chronology and typology (Figure 8).42 When looking at examples of miniatures and stained-glass windows more generally, the root is often somewhat abstract or merely shown as a curved green line with a few leaves, yet the consistency of the ascending trajectory, from bottom up (much like in family trees), always signifies the history of salvation.

Figure 8. Tree of Jesse, 1488, late Gothic relief carving. St. Peter’s Cathedral, Worms, Germany.
Figure 8. Tree of Jesse, 1488, late Gothic relief carving. St. Peter’s Cathedral, Worms, Germany.

Family Trees of Art

In the historiography of art, the image of the family tree has been frequently adapted into ‘family trees of art’ and used to classify and arrange both artistic currents and individual positions.43 Analogous to evolutionary biology of their respective times, these family trees show art history to be a natural process and implicitly assume processes of ‘natural’ selection. ‘Stronger’ artistic positions that exhibit ‘greater quality’ or are ‘naturally more meaningful’ gain status and prevail over others.44 This form of representation, however, fails to attend to context — whether political, social, or related to gender or identity — ignoring parallel or complementary strands of art history, failed experiments, and artistic expressions that might have been esteemed at the time in which they emerged, but subsequently lost currency, resulting in their exclusion at a later date from a certain tree.45 Moreover, only those ‘main’ art forms are noted on the branches and leaves of such trees, particularly those which could claim a supra-regional importance in the Global North as a result of utilizing the infrastructures necessary for generating attention and significance. When looking at different examples, the family trees of art are built on a positivist conception of developmental stages over time, with the positions located at the roots being the earliest, and with a more complex branching of artistic expressions into their respective presents. Periphery and transgressive artistic positions are analogized to the ethnography of time, the ‘other’ is imagined as being not only spatially, but also temporally distant.46

What is striking about tree diagrams of art is how they arose as positivist attempts to impose categorizations in ‘modern art’. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the history of modern art is generally seen as one of radical fragmentation, stemming from an ongoing obsession with innovation, the breaking of taboos, the fragmentation of canons, and proliferation of all sorts of -isms.47 Curators, artists, and art historians in the Global North have arranged artistic genealogies in tree form, seemingly intrigued by the possibilities of visually representing a diversity of artistic expression through elaborate branching and dense foliage. Among the best-known of such tree diagrams of art are those by Alfred Barr, Ad Reinhardt, and Miguel Covarrubias.48 In a blog entry on his Center for the Aesthetic Revolution, de la Barra names these three tree metaphors as sources of inspiration for his own pictorial invention,49 thus inverting the typical ‘direction’ of artistic inspirations whereby ‘Western cosmopolites’ adopt ‘Southern’, ‘Primitive’ motifs and translate them in a productive and avant-gardist creative process. More specifically, in Diagrama Tropical, de la Barra formulates a response to Covarrubias’s Tree of Modern Art (1933), Barr’s Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), and Reinhardt’s How to Look at Modern Art in America (1946). Each of these charts uses the metaphor of the tree to illustrate an explicitly Western perception of art historiography in modern times. Parallel to the linear construct of artistic ‘evolution’, they also conceptualized the modern as intrinsically Western; tropical positions are noticeably absent — they are not assigned a place in any of these diagrams.

Covarrubias thematizes the role of ‘other’ arts merely as a category of inspiration, musing, and influence. To illustrate this, he depicts two sculptures that he presumably finds ‘uncategorizable’ outside the family tree, which have no active role in art historiography (Figure 9). First published in 1933 in Vanity Fair magazine, Covarrubias — who was originally from Mexico and became an esteemed member of New York’s avant-garde circles — imagines modern art history as beginning in the 1850s with artists like Delacroix, Poussin, and Courbet, who form the roots of the tree alongside four further male painters, all of whom are French.50 As the lineage of modern art history develops, the roots merge together to form a thick trunk, which directs the viewer’s gaze up through the Impressionists, a period deemed to have given rise to the entire crown of art history thereafter. Branching off in three strands of development are Cézanne, Seurat, and Gauguin and Van Gogh (who form an interconnecting branch) — notably all of whom are still males from the French avant-garde. The ‘-isms’ then emerge in turn, most of which are not French but are no less hegemonic. While specific figures such as F. T. Marinetti, Emil Nolde, Vasily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee are inscribed on the leaves of the tree, there is a notable absence of female or non-European artists. Despite Covarrubias’s own upbringing in Mexico, his Tree of Modern Art does not serve as a conduit between the artistic circles of the United States, Europe, and non-Europeans.

Figure 9. Miguel Covarrubias, The Tree of Modern Art — Planted 60 Years Ago, 1933, illustration originally published in Vanity Fair, 40.3 (May 1933).
Figure 9. Miguel Covarrubias, The Tree of Modern Art — Planted 60 Years Ago, 1933, illustration originally published in Vanity Fair, 40.3 (May 1933).

It is interesting, however, to take note of the graphic composition in the area surrounding the tree. To the right of the trunk, a middle-aged man reclines on the ground. His outfit would suggest he belongs to the educated middle-class, and he holds an ornate, empty frame in his hands. He gazes into the space in which there should be a work of art — an allegory for how the canon of art history has been actively shaped by such ‘educated’ men, and that it has been made in their image. Lying on the ground to the left of the tree, opposite the man, are two types of artefacts that are excluded from the tree and its branching history of art. One is a white marble head resembling an ancient statue. The other is an African ‘fetish’ figure, which would have been easily recognizable at the time because of their presence in both popular and elite culture: ethnographic museums were already commonplace during this period, collections of ethnographic objects were exhibited at world’s fair, and Primitivist appropriations were presented in galleries and featured in books, such as the German art historian and writer Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik (1915) — which was then reprinted in 1921 under the title Afrikanische Plastik. Within the context of Covarrubias’ Tree of Modern Art, both the classical and ‘fetish’ statues represent two important sources of inspiration in modern art: temporally distant Antiquity in the form of classicism, and geographically distant African art in the form of modernist ‘Primitivism’.

Just three years later, Alfred Barr, who at the time was the inaugural director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, created his abstract family tree of art (Figure 10). Notably, Barr inverted the chronological direction typical of such diagrams, and instead positioned the earliest movements at the top of the page and the more recent ones at the bottom. Moreover, he drew a clear distinction between Western art movements — represented in black — and the influence of extra-European and extra-fine-art sources, marked in red,51 including what he termed ‘Japanese Prints’, ‘Negro Sculpture’, ‘Near-Eastern Art’, and ‘Machine Esthetic’. For Barr, the development of abstract art began in 1890 and ended in his present, 1935, after which the initially complex genealogical strands were distilled into two basic currents: non-geometrical abstract art and geometrical abstract art. This visualization presented artistic development in a genealogical way, emphasizing that any seemingly autonomous movement, in fact, emerges successively from what came before it in a ‘necessary history of advancement, following an inner logic’.52 With its focus on the idea of continuity and progress, the diagram omitted non- (or counter-)hegemonic positions, peripherally localized developments, and did not even account for figurative art.

Figure 10. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cover of the exhibition catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art, MoMA 1936, offset, printed in colour, 19.7 x 26 cm. The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. Photo credit: Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.
Figure 10. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cover of the exhibition catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art, MoMA 1936, offset, printed in colour, 19.7 x 26 cm. The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. Photo credit: Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

Ad Reinhardt, the abstract painter and art theoretician from the United States, responded in 1946 to such genealogies with partial irony, by giving his own tree the title How to Look at Modern Art in America (Figure 11).53 Packed densely into the trunk are the names Braque, Matisse, and Picasso, all artists who Reinhardt deemed the foundational figures of modern art. Their formulations of the avant-garde grew from Primitivist, non-European sources. Furthermore, they all had formal interest in artistic styles and movements where individual authorship was seldom ascribed. As such, ‘Greek Art’, ‘Persian Miniature’, ‘Primitive’, ‘Negro Sculpture’, and so on, appear in small print in the soil beneath Reinhardt’s tree.54 His mission to complete the empty leaves with names of artists who were not formerly considered part of the canon posed a certain challenge; it demanded him to take on the role of an art historian. Nevertheless, by virtue of its aspirations to extend the scope of art history, Reinhardt’s illustration could be considered one of the most direct influences for de la Barra, whose Diagrama Tropical went one step further by filling out the remaining bananas in his own diagram with names of artists from the Global South. Thus, while Reinhardt spoke with a hint of irony to the manmade nature of art history, stating ‘The best way to escape from all this is to paint yourself. If you have any friends that we overlooked, here are some extra leaves. Fill in and paste up…!’, de la Barra referenced and repurposed this final sentence in his own poster. Here he wrote, ‘If you have any friends that we overlooked, there are some extra bananas. Fill in….’55

Figure 11. Ad Reinhardt, How to Look at Modern Art in America, 1946, illustration originally published in P.M. magazine, 6.299 (2 July 1946).
Figure 11. Ad Reinhardt, How to Look at Modern Art in America, 1946, illustration originally published in P.M. magazine, 6.299 (2 July 1946).

One striking aspect of Reinhardt’s tree is the inclusion of a thick branch representing the commercialized art market, which he depicts as so overladen with weight that it appears to be on the verge of snapping. Beneath the broken branch is a depression in the ground that has been filled with signs referencing popular and commercial visual culture, including ‘Lucky Strike’, ‘Pepsi-Cola’, ‘Pin-ups’, ‘Oil’, and so on, from which a cornfield is growing. Here, maize plants mirror the aesthetic and historical significance of bananas. Corn was traditionally a staple food amongst Indigenous populations in the Americas before it was appropriated by the Global North, where it came to be grown on an industrial scale to initially generate, and later fulfil, a consumer ‘need’.56 In this respect, Reinhardt’s illustration sees the cornstalk’s leaves as fitting ‘vessels’ for artists who were seen to produce ‘easily consumable’ or less ‘substantial’ art. From Norman Rockwell, to John Steuart Curry, to Grant Wood, Reinhardt suggests here that these artists serve only to meet the needs of the art market, rather than drawing upon the deeper roots of artistic traditions that have either developed over centuries or have complex and diverse roots.57 With his criticism of market mechanisms and the superficial fads of modern painting, Reinhardt suggests a further dimension for the symbolism behind the trees of art: he contrasts the ‘good’ and slowly growing ‘indigenous’ plants with the ‘rampant growth’ of ‘imported’ and ‘exotic’ hothouse plants.

Such depictions visually aligned notions of development with the idea of consistent advancement, represented in Reinhardt’s case through the metaphor of the tree, with movement from the roots, up the trunk, and into increasingly complex networks of branches. Similar images came to be widely adopted in visual art historiography to depict a history of progress parallel to Western art production. Almost always, growth was illustrated as linear and advancing from the bottom up, forming an occident-informed reading of a civilization that is ever-advancing, alongside the ongoing pluralization of artistic phenomena. Tropical vegetation, however, can be thought of as exuberant and generously abundant. It has rhizomatous branches, intertwining lianas, large flowers, and leaves that provide food, water, shade, and shelter for many creatures. It has steaming earth and dripping treetops, the dense vegetation can be disorientating but also functions as the ‘lungs of the earth’. In this spirit, the bunch of bananas hangs inverted from the bush, its individual fruits bending back toward the sun. This imagery of tropical flora inherently runs counter to linearity. As such, it is proposed here as a method for rethinking art histories via the notion of ‘tropicalizing’ as a subversive strategy for radically reorganizing canons, and reflecting a more ‘worlded’ art history.

Tropicalizing the Tree of Art: ‘Worlding’ Practices

De la Barra’s Diagrama Tropical is one among many critical artistic positions relating to the Global South. It speaks specifically to South America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, reappropriating the visual forms and historical discourses around ‘tropicalization’ in order to highlight parallels to natural environments, colonial usurpation, and art-historical canonization.58 These artistic positions have often reclaimed interpretive power by visually inverting and positively reevaluating tropical nature as a decolonized and creative space.59 Susana Chávez Silverman and Frances R. Aparicio explain the use of tropicalization through bell hooks and Néstor García Canclini’s understanding of tropicalization as a resemanticization of cultural stereotypes into ‘discursive weapons of resistance’:

The margins that bell hooks evokes as ‘sites of radical possibilities’ are the locations from which these re-tropicalizing tendencies are surfacing. […] many other Latino/a writers and performers are standing the dominant culture’s stereotypes and images on their heads from the margins, resemanticizing them, in García Canclini’s words, from hegemonic tools into discursive weapons of resistance.60

In the example of de la Barra’s tropical diagram which I outlined previously, there is a clear ‘attempt and a first approximation to construct a new tropical history and historiography’.61 The traditional tree diagram is resemanticizing here through both ‘tropical’ artistic positions and ‘tropical’ botanical imagery. The diagram can be read as, in Chávez Silverman’s and Aparicio’s words, a ‘polydirectional and multivocal approach to the politics of representation’62 from a positionality of the ‘tropics’. In the poster’s upper left-hand corner, de la Barra printed the title, Novo Museo Tropical Manifesto, expressing his attempt to create an expanded art historical field for tropical manifestations, and in turn, de-localizing the field from any one geography (Figure 12). As stated in the manifesto’s text: ‘Being Tropical is not about location it’s about attitude.’63 Further corroborating this process of tropicalizing art history, de la Barra co-conceptualized and co-curated the 1st Gran Bienal Tropical (Great Tropical Biennial), held in Puerto Rico in December 2011 under the motto ‘Tropico Abierto’ (Open Tropics). This featured many artworks that engaged with associations of the ‘tropical’, including the banana.64

Figure 12. Pablo León de la Barra, Diagrama Tropical/Nova Cartografia Tropical (detail), 2010, poster, digital print on paper.
Figure 12. Pablo León de la Barra, Diagrama Tropical/Nova Cartografia Tropical (detail), 2010, poster, digital print on paper.

Diagrama Tropical’s inversion of traditional ‘trees of knowledge’ in the image of a banana plant reflects a wider epistemological turn in which thinking proceeds from ‘other’ and ‘tropical’ perspectives, and adopts a ‘tropical attitude’ to visualize art canons. Here it is crucial to note that such an operation of tropicalization does not follow the Saidian tradition of altogether rejecting a normative Western imagining of the ‘tropics’.65 Rather, it is a conscious and empowering intellectual reappropriation, or ‘cannibalization’66 of existing imagery and discourses. It involves inversion of such imaginings, and an epistemic shift of perspective on art history and art-making. Tropicalization releases creative potential in the image of inversion. It invites productive thinking and open-ended historiography, instigating an ongoing, inclusive, and situated process67 — one that is perhaps most vividly embodied in the top-down, fruit-bearing figure of the banana plant.

There is much agency in such artistic discourses where the ‘tropical’ is (re)presented through stereotyped images. These have the potential to appropriate and reinterpret attributions of tropicality as the ‘Other’. Tropicalization is, moreover, a process of reclaiming the dominant interpretative perspective, an intellectual act that mirrors understandings of tropicality which have been historically projected onto the Global South — in particular, Latin America and the Caribbean.68 The art historian Samantha A. Noël has shown that tropicality is not only an important reference for ‘Black modernism’, but also bears the potential to ‘function as a key unifying element among peoples of the Black Atlantic’.69 She proposes an alternative understanding of the tropics through an ‘investigation of how Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century responded to the colonial and hegemonic regimes through visual and performative tropicalist representation’.70 Furthermore, she adds, ‘This ideological heeding of nature should be viewed as an alternative modernity that counters the idea of transforming “undeveloped” nature for the sake of capitalist expansion. In so doing, there is a particular political enterprise at stake, one that dissociates the land with the history of slavery and thereby reclaims it.’71 In the case of banana plants, tropicalization may be understood as an appropriation of this overdetermined sign of the ‘tropics’ in, and through, an image. It is resignified as a concept or a model that challenges entrenched canons, posits new ones, and, above all, questions the very validity of Western, colonially determined (art) historiographical models. In this vein, de la Barra’s Diagrama Tropical tropicalizes trees of art by presenting only those positions that underpin the ‘tropics’, albeit from several perspectives and various historical contexts. The diagram thus includes modern artists like those from the Tropicália movement in Brazil,72 while also recording the role of dictatorships as a dominating factor affecting the historiography of tropical arts, and ultimately moves towards contemporary positions, such as that of Cuban conceptual artist Wilfredo Prieto.

Situated in the upper part of de la Barra’s composition, from a tropical perspective these contemporary positions have the potential to challenge and reinterpret canonized artistic representations of the ‘tropics’ and the ways in which they have been categorized.73 For instance, mention of poet and writer Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago (1928) which sparked the antropofagia movement in Brazil, evokes associations with early artistic attempts to both consciously address and humorously deconstruct the history of ‘tropicality’ in the arts. Proponents of antropofagia highlighted how the notion of ‘the tropics’ was deeply intertwined with Western perspectives connected to the enduring legacies of colonialism, the slave trade, dehumanization, and capitalization of the tropics in the plantation system. De Andrade had originally proposed the concept of ‘cultural cannibalism’ in his manifesto as a means of restoring culture that had been the victim of epistemic violence during colonial rule and beyond. His manifesto, in turn, had been inspired by Tarsila do Amaral’s painting Abapóru (1928) — a name composed of two Tupi-Guarani words meaning ‘the man who eats human flesh’. In this work, and many of her others, do Amaral often referenced Western projections of Brazil as a ‘tropical paradise’.74 In Postcard (Figure 13), a painting that is much larger than its title suggests, do Amaral echoes stereotypes of Brazil as a tropical Eden, one that is so picturesque that it can be easily consumed or readily digested. It uses the icons of tropicality, including large, exuberant plants and trees that grow in the midst of a harmoniously arranged village, alluding to a tranquil and authentic ‘tropical’ lifestyle. However, the vastly enlarged format of the ‘postcard’ (the canvas is actually 127.5 by 142.5 cm) makes it clear that it is a fake and idealized image, designed to attract tourists and fulfil colonialist expectations. The image of the tropics is reappropriated and becomes its own mode of cultural anthropophagy: the modernist style is appropriated, digested, and reapplied to the image that was originally invented by colonizers as, in the words of the semiotician Walter Mignolo, the proponents and executors of the ‘darker side of modernity’.75 Similarly, de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago also refers to vegetation, describing it in the following terms: ‘It was because we never had grammars, nor collections of old plants’.76 De Andrade connects the ways in which language is structured to the categorization of vegetation, and the ‘normalizing’ of these Western knowledge systems as colonial acts. In doing so, he argues for a more liberal, creative, and wild approach to these phenomena, which are crucial in the question of the ‘origins’ of one’s own and re-owned cultures. In essence, he asks: who can claim the right to owning and knowing a culture?

Figure 13. Tarsila do Amaral, Postcard (Cartão-postal), 1929, oil on canvas, 127.5 x 142.5 cm, private collection, Rio de Janeiro © Tarsila do Amaral Licenciamentos.
Figure 13. Tarsila do Amaral, Postcard (Cartão-postal), 1929, oil on canvas, 127.5 x 142.5 cm, private collection, Rio de Janeiro © Tarsila do Amaral Licenciamentos.

Some forty years after the publication of Manifesto Antropófago, the Brazilian Tropicália movement took up the discourses of re-tropicalization again. In particular, the conceptual artist Hélio Oiticica reappropriated the term ‘tropicality’ for his art practice in 1967. In an essay of the same title, he wrote:

The myth of ‘Tropicality’ is much more than parrots and banana trees: it is the consciousness of not being conditioned by established structures, hence highly revolutionary in its entirety. Any conformity, be it intellectual, social, or existential, is contrary to its principal idea.77

Oiticica deconstructed icons of the tropics such as the banana tree, and argued that they did not represent ‘tropicality’; on the contrary, he suggested that the condition of the tropical be understood as an empowered state of mind that subverts the norm. In the above-mentioned essay, he describes his installation Tropicália, which was first shown in Rio de Janeiro in 1967 (Figure 14). At the time, Brazil was controlled by a military dictatorship that radically and violently restricted the rights and freedoms of its citizens. In response, Oiticica took a political stance by inviting visitors to directly participate with the installation by resting within it, enjoying the peace and quiet, and meeting people there. In doing so, he harnessed stereotypes of the tropics, such as colourful cloths, simple self-made huts, sand, tropical plants, and exposed them as clichés by exhibiting them as constructions or fakes. For example, plants were exhibited in flower pots rather than suggesting they would be growing outside amidst nature. Through such gestures, Oiticica challenged the stereotype of the tropical as being simple and authentic, and instead linked it to the real poverty of the favelas by deconstructing the ‘myth of Tropicality’.78

Figure 14. Collage of photographs of Hélio Oiticica’s Tropicália, Penetrables PN 2 ‘Purity is a myth’ and PN 3 ‘Imagetical’, wooden frames, cotton fabric, plastic sheets, carpet, nylon fabric, dimensions displayed: 248 x 1514 x 635 cm. Installation view: Tate, London. Photos courtesy of María José Martínez Sánchez, 2018.
Figure 14. Collage of photographs of Hélio Oiticica’s Tropicália, Penetrables PN 2 ‘Purity is a myth’ and PN 3 ‘Imagetical’, wooden frames, cotton fabric, plastic sheets, carpet, nylon fabric, dimensions displayed: 248 x 1514 x 635 cm. Installation view: Tate, London. Photos courtesy of María José Martínez Sánchez, 2018.

Another work which also addresses the concept of tropicality in relation to plants is the series Musa paradisiaca (2022) (the botanical Latin name of the banana plant),79 by the Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino. This explicitly links a history of violence to the banana, highlighting the framework of colonialism and imperialism in which this violence unfolded (Figure 15). Using mixed media such as digital print, acrylic paint, and stitching, Paulino shows images that refer to the historiography of the banana, inscribing these into the writing of art history. In turn, she reveals colonial expressions of physical, mental, and epistemic violence, citing these as legitimate subjects of an exploitative art. In doing so, she makes evident violent relations which normally remain hidden within art history. More specifically, Paulino depicts botanical drawings of the banana tree in juxtaposition with two photographic reproductions. One is an anthropological photograph of a mother with a child tied to her back — a stark representation of the relationship of violence which is implicit when thinking about the colonial contexts in which such standardized photographs were produced. The second photograph (which is also repeated in a mirror image on the right-hand side of the composition) explicitly shows violence exacted on the bodies of enslaved people in plantations. Here, too, a woman and a small child performing hard physical labour are depicted. Two sections of the canvas are printed with the words ‘Yes, nós temos’ (Yes, we do), referring to a popular Brazilian carnival song that addresses ‘the exuberance of a tropical Brazil through the trope of the banana’.80 At the centre of the collage is a depiction of blue and white azulejos (a form of Portuguese painted tin-glazed ceramic tilework), with a broken surface that glows with a blood-red tone. Paulino repeatedly works with the image of azulejos, which were in fact a hybrid product of colonialism and slavery that was traded around the globe, becoming an aesthetic symbol of Portuguese façade design in urban areas.81 As with the notion of the suture, which points to the stitches that hold together and even help to heal a wound, the roughly sewn pieces of canvas are semantically central here. They make visible the wounds of colonialism and the plantation economy, as well as the broken culture of remembrance.

Figure 15. Rosana Paulino, Untitled, from the series Musa Paradisiaca, 2022, 75 x 104 cm, digital print on canvas, acrylic, and stitching. Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM São Paulo, Paris, New York, and Brussels. Photo credit: Bruno Leão.
Figure 15. Rosana Paulino, Untitled, from the series Musa Paradisiaca, 2022, 75 x 104 cm, digital print on canvas, acrylic, and stitching. Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM São Paulo, Paris, New York, and Brussels. Photo credit: Bruno Leão.

A Subversive Re-thinking of Art History through Tropicality

Drawing upon the above examples, I would like to conclude by outlining some philosophical and theoretical positions developed with — and from — specific forms of vegetation. I am particularly interested in reflections on tropicalizing acts as instruments for developing a more ‘worlded’ art historiography. In their book Mille plateau (1980), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari established the metaphor of the rhizome as a counterargument to the tree of knowledge and its implied hierarchical, at times even totalitarian, structure. This metaphor served as the basis for their poststructuralist model of organizing knowledge and describing the world through the image of a root network system. For Deleuze and Guattari, this was characterized by seemingly random interconnections and nodal points, an ability to spread out in all directions, establish countless cross-connections between different organizational plateaus,82 and even sidestep seemingly obvious ones. They write, ‘Thought is not arborescent […] Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree’, and prior to this they state, ‘We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes.’83

For Italian literary historian and theorist Franco Moretti, however, the tree diagram presents a possibility to represent quantitative diversification.84 He proposes a ‘distant reading’ for the historiography of literature, a reading that is not focused on a single work but, employing a comparative graph, embeds the relatively small circle of an established canon in a much broader, ‘worlded’ set of relationships. Moretti uses the tree metaphor — albeit only once visually — along with graphs and maps to criticize traditional canons and, indeed, to redefine the very conception of the aesthetic.85 I would like to rethink these proposals to counteract the tree metaphor in the image of ‘other’ and ‘worlded’ trees in conjunction with art historian Andrea Giunta’s ‘strategies of modernity’ in the ‘periphery’ of Latin America. In the essay ‘Strategies of Modernity in Latin America’, Giunta summarizes and names a number of ‘exploratory ways’ historically used to create an artistic ‘liberational culture’ in the region. She writes,

In the early twentieth century cultural proposals were born of strategies that implied, above all, an ideological inversion of values. To devour, mix, appropriate, and reappropriate, invert, fragment and join, take central discourse, penetrate and cut through it until it becomes a useful tool for the search for and creation (plagued with achievements and failures) of our own subversive discourse: these are the exploratory ways in which some enlightened artists created their visual constructions as part of the programme of a liberational culture.86

In addition to these examples of ‘Southern’ models of theoretical and art historical knowledge that question the hierarchical tree metaphor, there have also been a number of artistic and theoretical positions drawing upon Indigenous epistemologies. These often proceed from the assumption that plants — and a connection to vegetative nature as a whole — are intellectually meaningful.87 A strong example of a current interdisciplinary and artistic collaborative project which draws upon Indigenous knowledge is Devenir Universidad (Becoming University). Founded in 2019, this project seeks to build a university in the Colombian rainforest and centres on the idea that the interconnection between land, vegetation, and human beings offers a specific means for generating knowledge. The project is officially described in the following terms:

Devenir Universidad is a biocultural project engaging in the process of an Amazonian territory becoming university. […] As a growing biocultural organism, the project involves human and nonhuman minds in bridging different knowledge systems. At the heart of the research lies the living cognitive territory and the ways in which this knowledge can be protected and transmitted. The university expands across the territory in a decentralized configuration of learning sites and paths. New pedagogies are designed to generate place-based knowledge and drive the paradigm shift from an extractive to a generative and imaginative relationship with the territory.88

Contributors to this project include members from the Inga community, who work in dialogue with the architect Anne Lacaton and the video artist Ursula Biemann, among others (Figure 16).89 As a whole, the project aims to highlight the unique interrelationship between the production of artistic images, knowledge as process (devenir), and the metaphor of the ‘tropical’ tree. The relevance of images is also noted on the project’s website:

Images are not merely depicting already existing realities, they contribute to reality-making, to world-making. This concept of image-making is vital for a project that assembles undocumented histories and memories, engages with nonhuman actors, visualizes invisibilized dynamics, performs a deep description of the territory, and generally creates a new knowledge organization from scratch.90

Figure 16. Ursula Biemann, Forest Mind, 2021, video (film still), courtesy of the artist.
Figure 16. Ursula Biemann, Forest Mind, 2021, video (film still), courtesy of the artist.

The artistic positions discussed here are diverse in their respective time frames and temporalities. Nevertheless, they are all situated within or in relation to Latin America, and in ‘intrarelations’ of complex entangled networks of dialogues and references.91 One common thread throughout the examples discussed in this chapbook, as well as numerous other approaches to Latin American art historiographies, is that they frequently deploy strategies of radically re-signifying and re-appropriating the image of the ‘tropics’. This is done as a tool for ‘worlding’ art history from a position that is precisely situated in time and space — and that becomes pluriversal when related to ‘other’ art history worlds, establishing complex and powerful entanglements. The Devenir Universidad project, for instance, offers a powerful example where artistic production, and reflections on art history and its related forms of knowledge, do not act in contradiction to each other. Rather, they are shown as entangled, collaborative, and dialogical. In fact, the Columbian tropical vegetation amongst which the university is planned to be built is not simply the site of the project and its architecture. Rather, it is an integral part of the artistic dimension of the project, and a key component to how Devenir Universidad generates knowledge about art.

Projects such as Devenir Universidad can help to subversively re-think art history through tropicality in order to produce worlded art historiographies. In the words of art historians Birgit Hopfener and Ming Tiampo, this subversive potential relies on closer examination of artistic forms and histories in context:

Art conceived through the lens of worlding resonates with recent discourses in art history that emphasize art’s temporal instability as a condition of enabling the reconceptualization of artworks as agents of alternative anachronic and heterochronic models of history writing and world-making.92

For Hopfener and Tiampo, pluriversal approaches to art history enable ‘art histories that are both situated and entangled with other discourses, seeking worlded approaches to difficult and obscured histories […]’.93 In their introduction to The World Multiple: The Quotidian Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds, Grant Jun Otsuki, Shiho Satsuka, Keiichi Omura, and Atsuro Morita propose to cultivate a perception of the ‘world multiple’, or in other words, the work/world in its ongoing process of constant worlding. Here, worlding is understood as a mode of intellectual thinking and a practice of living that acknowledges multitude: a world-multiple, a world woven into a textured fabric out of co-existing entangled thoughts and uneven forms of perceiving and making. Simultaneous to being a practice and a state of mind, worlding is also always a work in progress.94 As the world ‘progresses’, so too emerge new forms for visualizing ‘other’ and ‘tropical’ epistemologies through the arts, which revisit ideas such as the tropicalized gaze and tree charts.

Returning back to Diagrama Tropical, de la Barra offers an invitation to shift away from the rigidly structured history of progress in art. Instead, the coexisting banana-shaped spaces present a rich texture of polyvisual, plural artistic positions, which respond relationally to the ‘tropics’ and cultivate different ‘tropical’ perspectives. The image of the banana tree — this curious plant with its fruits hanging in joyously bright yellow bunches, nourishing and delicious — may serve to take up such a ‘tropical’ perspective and rethink, in and with it, the family trees of artistic developments, processes, and relations.

Notes

  1. Printed in A1 size, the ‘bananeiro tropical’ (‘tropical banana stalk’, as Pablo León de la Barra names the diagram) was featured in the project O Cartaz Como Espaco Expositivo Expandido (The poster as expanded exhibition space), curated by Kiki Mazzucchelli and designed by Mel Duarte for the 29th Bienal de São Paulo; Pablo León de la Barra, ‘“Diagrama Tropical” Bananas Poster, an Attempt to Construct a Tropical History’, 25 January 20211, Centre for the Aesthetic Revolution <http://centrefortheaestheticrevolution.blogspot.com/2011/01/diagrama-tropical-um-poster-bananeiro.html> [accessed: 17 January 2025]. ↵
  2. This fragmentary collation of several phenotypical expressions in an overall picture corresponds to what Daston and Galison have described as the truth-to-nature paradigm, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), pp. 55–114 in particular. ↵
  3. Loosely ordered from bottom to top (in a style that reproduces the poster's formatting): Alexander von Humboldt, Claude Lévi-Strauss (Tristes Tropiques 1955), Jean-Baptiste Debret, Georg von Langsdorff, Albert Eckhout, Wifredo Lam (La Jungla 1943), Henri Rousseau (Tigre dans une tempête tropicale 1891), Le Corbusier (Desenho da Bahia do Rio 1929), Roberto Burle Marx, Edward James (Las Pozas 1949/84), David Alfaro Siqueiros (América Tropical 1932), Aimé Césaire (Tropiques Magazines 1941/45), Tropical Emigration Society (Venezuela 1833/48), Oswald de Andrade (Manifesto Antropófago 1928), Mário de Andrade (Macunaíma 1928), Pedregulho (Affonso Eduardo Reidy 1946), Oscar Niemeyer (Casa das Canoas 1951/53), Flávio de Carvalho, Jean Prouvé (Maison Tropicale 1949/51), Fordlandia (Brasil 1828), Solentiname (Nicaragua 1965/66), Falanstérios (Brasil 1841), Tarsila do Amaral (Floresta 1929), Paulo Freire (Pedagogia do Oprimido 1968), Lina Bo Bardi (Casa de Vidro 1949/51), Lygia Pape (Divisor 1968), Agrippino de Paula (Hitler 3° Mundo 1968), Tomás G. Alea (Memorias del Subdesarrollo 1968), Zé Carioca, Novos Baianos (Acabou CHorare 1972), Ney Matogrosso (Secos e Molhados 1971/74), Augusto Boal (Teatro do Oprimido 1971), Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo 1982), Carmen Miranda, Salsa (Celia Cruz, Fania All Stars, El Gran Combo), Barry Manilow (Copacabana 1978), Tropicália: ou Panis et Circensis, Hélio Oiticica, Teología de la Liberación (1971), Intermezzo Tropical (Robert Smithson: Hotel Palenque 1969/72; Marcel Brodthaers: Un Jardin d’Hiver 1974; David Lamelas: The Dictator 1978; Juan Downey: The Laughing Alligator 1979), Glauber Rocha (A Ideale da Terra 1980), Claudio Perna, Club Tropicana (Havana, Cuba, desde 1939), D-I-T-A-D-U-R-A-S, Tetine (Tropical Punk 2008), Arto Lindsay (Mundo Civilizado 1996), Guattari & Rolnik (Molecular Revolution in Brazil 1982), Dominique González-Foerster (Tropicale Modernité 1999, Tropicalisation! 2004), XXIV Bienal de São Paulo (Paulo Herkenhoff, São Paulo 1998), Etnografía (Modo de empleo, arqueología, bellas artes, etnografía y variedades — Julieta González, Caracas 2002), Jarbas Lopes, Tropicália (Carlos Basualdo, Chicago — London — New York 2005/06), Mamõyguara Opá Mamõ Pupé (Adriana Pedrosa 2009), Hélio Melo, Alexandre da Cunha, Marepe, Rivane Neuenschwander, Erika Verzutti, Ducha, Alberto Baraya (Herbario Artificial desde 2002), Oswaldo Maciá (Sinfonía de Canto de Aves 1999), Tamar Guimarães (Canoas 2010), Banana Republics, Hammocks, Beatriz Milhazes, Banana Art, Abravanistas, Wilson Díaz, Fernando Bryce, Alexander Apóstol, Sergio Vega (Tropicalounge 2002/05), Maurício Lupini, Armando Andrade Tudela (Transa 2005), Wendelien van Oldenborgh (Lina Bo Bardi Didactic Room and Fan Day 2010), Marjetica Potrč (Florestania 2006), Federico Herrero, Melanie Smith, avaf, Marcelo Krasilcic, Tropical Oriental, Pedro Reyes (Floating Pyramid 2004), Chemi Rosado (El Cerro de Naranjito, Puerto Rico 2001/02), Artist Residencies/Independent Schools, Los Super Elegantes, Allora & Calzadilla, Coco Locos, Jonathas de Andrade, Wilfredo Prieto. ↵
  4. In Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss focused primarily on Brazil, though in his philosophical reflections about the structures and mentalities of traditional societies in the ‘tropics’ he also referred to many other geographies, such as India and the Caribbean. ↵
  5. The other famously adopted emblem of the ‘tropics’ is the palm tree. ↵
  6. For an in-depth analysis of the works of Wifredo Lam and Oswald de Andrade, see Andrea Giunta, ‘Strategies of Modernity in Latin America’, in Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms, ed. by Elaine O. Brian and others (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), pp. 302–14. ↵
  7. For earlier attempts, namely in the European Middle Ages, to classify the arts as liberal and mechanical arts as well as the visual forms in which these divisions appeared, see Joan Cadden, ‘The Organization of Knowledge: Disciplines and Practices’, in The Cambridge History of Science, ed. by D. Lindberg and M. Shank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 240–67 <https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9780511974007.011>. For the Renaissance era, Claire Farago has shown the contemporary mechanisms to classify the ‘visual arts’ as a process of differentiation between ‘liberal’ and ‘mechanical’ arts. She also discusses the ‘new, liberal status granted to painting, sculpture, and architecture during the sixteenth century’ as determining ‘the way in which nonwestern art was perceived by Europeans. The classification of the arts has been a significant factor contributing to the ethnocentric shape of our knowledge’. See Claire Farago, ‘The Classification of the Visual Arts during the Renaissance’, in The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. by Richard Popkin and Donald Kelley (Dordrecht-London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), pp. 23–48. ↵
  8. Daniel Clayton and Gavin Bowd, ‘Geography, Tropicality and Postcolonialism: Anglophone and Francophone readings of the work of Pierre Gourou’, L’Espace géographique, 35.3 (2006), pp. 208–21 (pp. 208–09) <https://doi.org/10.3917/eg.353.0208> See David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), pp. 141–68. ↵
  9. Arnold, The Problem of Nature, pp. 141–42. ↵
  10. Clayton and Bowd, ‘Geography, Tropicality and Postcolonialism’, p. 209. ↵
  11. See David Arnold, ‘“Illusory Riches”: Representations of the Tropical World, 1840–1950’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21.1 (March 2000), pp. 6–18 <https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9493.00060> (first published 19 December 2002); David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). ↵
  12. Clayton and Bowd, ‘Geography, Tropicality and Postcolonialism’, p. 209. See Arnold, ‘“Illusory Riches”’, especially pp. 10–13: ‘The Primitive Tropics’. The focus of this argumentation is on a Western perspective on the ‘tropics’, but it should be noted that the idea of tropicality is not exclusive to Western thought. The Maghrebi traveller and scholar Ibn Battuta is a famous example of a non-Western writer on ‘tropical’ regions. Between 1325 and 1354, Ibn Battuta visited most of North Africa, the Middle East, East Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, the Iberian Peninsula, and West Africa. He wrote an account of his journeys, titled, A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling, commonly known as The Rihla; see Ibn-Baṭṭūṭa, Muḥammad Ibn-ʿAbdallāh, Travels in Asia and Africa 1325–1354, trans. and selected by H.A.R. Gibb (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1997); Ibn-Baṭṭūṭa, Muḥammad Ibn-ʿAbdallāh, The Travels of Ibn Battuta to India, the Spice Islands, and China, trans. by Noël Q. King, ed. by Albion M. Butters (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2018). ↵
  13. Arnold, ‘“Illusory Riches”’, p. 9. Arnold notes the symbolic emergence of a ‘tropical world’, partly generated by the ‘dissemination of “useful” plants that would not flourish in northern climates but could be moved from one tropical or sub-tropical region to another, thus strengthening the visual impression as well as the economic utility of a single “tropical world”’. ↵
  14. The (Global) ‘South’ is not conceived of here as a geography, but as a concept and metaphor of social and cultural structures resulting from a state of modern-colonial, ‘Northern’ oppression. The relative and unstable relationship between an epistemic North and South is subject to shifting power relations, in which the centre/​periphery binary construction cannot be conceived of as independent from the relation of ‘modernity’ and ‘coloniality’. See Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality (Frantz Fanon Foundation, 2016) <https://fondation-frantzfanon.com/outline-of-ten-theses-on-coloniality-and-decoloniality/> [accessed 17 January 2025]. Hence, ‘Southernness’ is situated in specific local and geographical contexts, though not bound to them — ‘Southernness’ as a form of productive opposition can well be situated in the geographical Global North. See Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Maria Paula Meneses, Knowledges Born in the Struggle: Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South (New York: Routledge, 2019). ↵
  15. Marcus Termeer, Das Treibhaus und die sozialen Konstruktionen von Fremdheit (Münster: Verlag Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2020), p. 88; my translation. See also Arnold, ‘“Illusory Riches”’, p. 7: ‘The symbolism of the tropics was deeply ambivalent, for a landscape of seeming natural abundance and great fertility was also paradoxically a landscape of poverty and disease […]’. See further Kunst um Humboldt. Reisestudien aus Mittel- und Südamerika von Rugendas, Bellermann und Hildebrandt im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett, exh. cat. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, ed. by Sigrid Achenbach (München: Hirmer, 2009); Stephan Besser, Pathographie der Tropen. Literatur, Medizin und Kolonialismus um 1900 (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2013); Johannes Fabian, Out of our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). ↵
  16. Cf., among others, Marina Warner, ‘Going Bananas’, in No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock, ed. by Marina Warner (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), pp. 348–72. Samantha A. Noël, Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), notes an ‘overwhelming presence of visual references and various accoutrements in the arts and popular culture of the early twentieth century that can be attributed to the tropics’ (p. 2). ↵
  17. Cf. James W. Martin, Banana Cowboys: The United Fruit Company and the Culture of Corporate Colonialism (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018); Shana Klein, The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food, and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020); Tanz um die Banane: Handelsware und Kultobjekt, exh. cat. Museum der Arbeit, Hamburg, ed. by Museum der Arbeit, Hamburg and Christina Bargholz (Hamburg and Munich: Dölling und Galitz Verlag, 2003); Peter Chapman, Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World (New York: Canongate, 2009). ↵
  18. Cf. Denise Daum, Albert Eckhouts ‘gemalte Kolonie’ — Bild- und Wissensproduktion über Niederländisch-Brasilien um 1640 (Marburg: Jonas, 2009); Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). ↵
  19. Tanja Michalsky has traced and described the cultural appropriation of Brazilian landscapes (using the example of Eckhout’s contemporary painter Frans Post) during the period of Dutch colonial rule: ‘The shaping of the unknown land by the Dutch is not only the subject of the pictures, it not only takes place in the concrete mastering of space, but it is also manifest in the cultural incorporation of the land, camouflaged as mere description.’ Tanja Michalsky, Projektion und Imagination. Die niederländische Landschaft der Frühen Neuzeit im Diskurs von Geografie und Malerei (Munich: Fink Verlag, 2011), p. 329. Cf. Daniela Bleichmar, Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). ↵
  20. It's pertinent to note that plantation economies during this period encompassed not only Central America and the Caribbean, but also the Canary Islands and countries on the continent of Africa including Cameroon. ↵
  21. In 1904, US-American writer O. Henry coined the term in his short story compendium Cabbages and Kings to describe the fictional Republic of Anchuria which was inspired by Honduras, where the author had experienced the state’s dependency on banana exports. ‘Banana republic’ is a political-scientific, pejorative term used to describe politically unstable countries in the tropical zone with a state-capitalism economy that depends on the export of natural resources, in particular bananas. Such a country runs as a private commercial enterprise for the exclusive profit of the oligarchical ruling class and the term is highly associated with corruption, see O. Henry, Cabbages and Kings (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1904); Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas, ed. by Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). ↵
  22. Cf. James Wiley, The Banana: Empires, Trade Wars, and Globalization (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008); Banana Wars: The Anatomy of a Trade Dispute, ed. by Timothy E. Josling and Timothy G. Taylor (Wallingford: CABI, 2003); Striffler and Moberg, Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas; Museum der Arbeit, Tanz um die Banane, pp. 60–91 in particular. ↵
  23. To offer a better view of her full breasts she has turned to present a three-quarter view, her head tilted in rapture and holding up the can with the advertised product, her appearance is highly erotic. Turning in on itself spirally, the pose is a topos of Western representations of the female body, enabling a lingering gaze of all the surfaces of her body connotated as erotic; Bernini’s marble sculpture Apollo and Daphne (1622–25) is not only paradigmatic here, but also anticipates the equation of femininity with ‘nature’, the mythological Daphne metamorphosing into a tree as a means of rescuing her when being chased by Apollo against her will, although she was thus robbed of any power to act. ↵
  24. See Tamiko Miyatsu, ‘Performing Savagery and Civility: The Subversive Nudity of Josephine Baker’, in Bodies that Work: African American Women’s Corporeal Activism in Progressive America (New York: Peter Lang, 2020), pp. 117–46; Merinda Simmons and James A. Crank, Race and New Modernisms (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019); The Josephine Baker Critical Reader: Selected Writings on the Entertainer and Activist, ed. by Mae G. Henderson and Charlene B. Regester (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017). ↵
  25. Cf. Lori Hall-Araujo, ‘Carmen Miranda and Brasilidade: Hollywood Glamour and Exoticism Reinterpreted’, Film, Fashion & Consumption, 2.3 (2013), pp. 231–46 <https://doi.org/10.1386/ffc.2.3.231_1>. A portion of the 1943 Busby Berkeley Technicolor musical The Gang’s All Here, starring Carmen Miranda, is available on youtube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLsTUN1wVrc>. Note the fetishization of the banana and the conflation of the banana with the sexy yet ‘tropical’ woman in the film. ↵
  26. ‘In her early years, Miss Chiquita found fame in the fruit aisle as an animated banana. Drawn in 1944 by cartoonist Dik Browne, the creator and illustrator of Hägar the Horrible and the Hi and Lois comics, Miss Chiquita gave a friendly, personal face to the Chiquita brand’ (Chiquita, n.d. <https://www.chiquita.com/the-chiquita-story/> [accessed 17 January 2025]). Only in 1987 was ‘Miss Chiquita humanized’ in the image of a sexy woman with fruit hat (ibid.). See also María Iqbal, ‘Bodies, Brands, and Bananas: Gender and Race in the Marketing of Chiquita Bananas’, The Journal of Historical Studies, 4.1 (Autumn 2015) <https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/prandium/article/view/25691> [accessed 17 January 2025]. ↵
  27. Noël, Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism, p. 14. ↵
  28. Henri Rousseau (for instance The Dream, 1910, oil on canvas, 204.5 × 298.5 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Paul Gauguin’s paintings and pottery, produced in his chosen exile in the South Sea’s French colonies in late nineteenth century, are famous examples; a tiki-style tropicalism in interior design, bar and music culture, and fashion was very much en vogue in mid-century United States and Europe (for instance, California invented itself as tropical paradise planting thousands of palm trees in the cityscape); cf. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘Going Native: Gauguin as the Founding Father of Primitivism’, Art in America, 77.7 (1989), pp. 118–29, p. 161; Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, ‘Primitive’, in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 217–33. ↵
  29. The Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers was edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (later co-edited by Louis de Jaucourt) from 1751 to 1772 (seventeen volumes and eleven plate volumes) in Paris. For a critical analysis of the ordering system and its visualization in the frontispiece, see Robert Darnton, ‘Philosophers trim the Tree of Knowledge: The Epistemological Strategy of the Encyclopédie’, in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 191–213; on the historicity of systems of order see also Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Pantheon Books, 1970; Les Mots et les Choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines, Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1966). For a critical reading of the Encyclopédie focusing on constructions of colonial alterity, see Karen Struve, Wildes Wissen in der Encyclopédie: Koloniale Alterität, Wissen und Narration in der französischen Aufklärung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). ↵
  30. Daston and Galison’s Objectivity provide many examples of such atlases and compendia, arranged according to the subjective importance given to the subjects by the authors, in their argument for a major epistemological shift from the truth-to-nature paradigm to the paradigm of objectivity in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ↵
  31. The Encyclopédie was of course by no means genuinely egalitarian; just the selection of the entries, made from a male-French perspective, generated many forms of bias. See the critical design podcast 99% Invisible, Episode 468, Alphabetical Order (29 November 2021) <https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/alphabetical-order/>. ↵
  32. I would suggest that the overall impression resembles a prickly-pear cactus, which grows according to other criteria than a European tree. The cactus itself is a potent metaphor in the discourse of ‘intrinsic’/‘extrinsic’ and ‘self’/‘other’ in the colonial context, see David Yetman, ‘The Cactus Metaphor’, in A Companion to Mexican History and Culture, ed. by William H. Beezley (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2011), pp. 131–42. ↵
  33. For perspectives on the long-standing impacts of Humboldt’s research on knowledge paradigms about ‘America’, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Mark Thurner, The Invention of Humboldt — On the Geopolitics of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2023). ↵
  34. Ottmar Ette, ‘Eine “Gemütsverfassung moralischer Unruhe” — Humboldtian Writing: Alexander von Humboldt und das Schreiben in der Moderne’, in Alexander von Humboldt — Aufbruch in die Moderne, ed. by Ottmar Ette and others (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), pp. 33–56. Eva Kernbauer, in her analysis of how the relationship between art and history has been conceptualized since 1800 and on concepts of artistic and historiographic representations, respectively, explains how Alexander von Humboldt’s brother, Prussian philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, was committed to a naturalistic concept of artistic and historical representation and not an idealistic one; see Eva Kernbauer, Art, History, and Anachronic Interventions since 1990 (New York: Routledge, 2022), pp. 28–30. ↵
  35. Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pflanzen nebst einem Naturgemälde der Tropenländer (Tübingen: F.G. Cotta, 1807); my translation. The French version Essai sur sur la géographie des plantes appeared in the same year and was translated as Essay on the Geography of Plants, trans. by Sylvie Romanowski (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). ↵
  36. Humboldt and Bonpland, Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pflanzen, p. 24; my translation. See also ibid., p. 25: ‘Under the almost countless multitude of vegetal types covering the earth, upon paying careful attention one can recognise just a few basic forms to which all the others may be traced back, and thus form so many families or groups. I will make do here with seventeen, the study of which is imperative for landscape painters.’ ↵
  37. Humboldt classified tropical plants into vegetation levels: the subterranean spore plants were followed by palms and banana trees, then come bracken, ferns and chinchona, and so on through to alpine plants, grasses and, at an altitude of over 4,600 metres, lichens. Describing banana plants in particular, he wrote: ‘Banana form: […] A fleshy, high, herbaceous-like trunk, formed out of delicate, silver-white, often black-flamed lamellae. Broad, tender, gleaming, striated, almost lily-like leaves, […]. Golden-yellow elongated fruits, bunched together like grapes.’ Humboldt and Bonpland, Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pflanzen, pp. 25–26. He then also describes the palm: ‘Palm form, a tall, unsplit, ringed shaft, often plumper and pricklier in the middle, upon which a crown of plumed or fan-like leaves majestically rise. At the end of the trunk mostly bivalve flower sheaths, out which the panicle breaks off.’ Ibid., p. 26. ↵
  38. Kept in the temperature- and humidity-controlled basement storage of the Berlin Herbarium (part of the Berlin Botanical Collections and Gardens founded in 1819), such specimens continue to serve the production of knowledge — albeit today in the context of climate change and declining biodiversity. ↵
  39. For the overlapping of conquest discourses in the Americas and artistic inscriptions, see Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). ↵
  40. See Oliver Geyer, ‘Gutes Gewächs, Teil 1: Zur deutschen Eiche’, in Pflanzen, special issue of Fluter, 78 (2021), p. 9 <https://www.fluter.de/sites/default/files/magazines/pdf/fluter_no.78_klein_0.pdf> [accessed 17 January 2025]; Jeffrey K. Wilson, The German Forest: Nature, Identity, and the Contestation of a National Symbol, 1871–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). ↵
  41. As a number of other well-known publications testify, Haeckel was not just interested in presenting such a vision of man’s position in the evolutionary chain; he also posited — participating in the contemporary discourse on race and the construction of ‘white supremacy’ — the white male to be the very goal of evolution. Comparative physiognomy had become a significant factor in ‘racial science’ since the mid–nineteenth century. The construct of white supremacy is evident in many visual examples, as is the classification of human beings with dark skin as ‘primitive’. In the same publication from 1874, Plate XI shows three types of apes and a human labelled ‘N[…]’, all sitting together on the branches of a tree. Racializing implications of this kind are inherent to the evolutionary genealogical tree in terms of its symbolism as a ‘German’ tree. The obviously constructed hierarchical classifications based on ‘stages of development’, which extend from the ‘primitive’ and creaturely through to the ‘cultivated’ and human, are expressions of a massive upheaval in relation to a previous understanding of the world, in which man had been the irrefutable ‘crown of creation’. See Ernst Haeckel, Anthropogenie oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen: gemeinverständliche wissenschaftliche Vorträge über die Grundzüge der menschlichen Keimes- und Stammes-Geschichte (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1874), plate XI. ↵
  42. Manuel Lima shows scores of examples of tree diagrams and explains their genesis in the preface; the book is not analytical however, offering descriptions and not considering the specific figurative forms, see Manuel Lima, The Book of Trees — Visualizing Branches of Knowledge (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2014). For the tradition of the Tree of Jesse, tracing the genealogy of Jesus to the Old Testament’s King David and his father Jesse, see Susan L. Green, Tree of Jesse Iconography in Northern Europe in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (New York: Routledge, 2019). ↵
  43. See the detailed art historical analysis by Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Stammbäume der Kunst. Zur Genealogie der Avantgarde (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005). Schmidt-Burkhardt provides many examples and works through the ‘self-historicization of modernism’ in the form of the tree chart, but refrains from including a perspective that is non-Western or critical of the avant-garde. ↵
  44. See Julia Voss, ‘Wer schreibt die Kunstgeschichte? Kunstwissenschaft, Markt und Museum’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 78.1 (2015), pp. 16–31 (pp. 16–18). ↵
  45. For critical approaches towards (Western) canonization processes in art history, see Monica Juneja, Can Art History Be Made Global? Meditations from the Periphery (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023) in general, though in particular chapter three, ‘Traversing Scale(s): Transcultural Modernism with and beyond the Nation’, pp. 137–200; Partisan Canons, ed. by Anna Brzyski (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Rafael Cardoso, ‘Decolonizing the Canon?’, Texte zur Kunst, 128 (December 2022), pp. 98–107 <https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/128/raphael-cardoso-decolonizing-the-canon/>; Miriam Oesterreich and Kristian Handberg, ‘Other Archives, Alter-canons and Alter-gardes: Formations and Re-formations of Art-historical Canons in Contemporary Exhibitions Staging Latin American and Eastern European Arts’, in The Canonisation of Modernism: Exhibition Strategies in the 20th and 21st Century, ed. by Gregor Langfeld and Tessel M. Bauduin, special issue of Journal of Art Historiography, 19 (2018) <https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/handberg-oesterreich.pdf> [accessed 8 March 2024]. ↵
  46. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002 [1983]). ↵
  47. Walter Fähnders and Hubert van den Berg posit that ‘avant-garde practices also reveal a uniform tendency that aims for something new: crossing boundaries, violating boundaries, transgression’. Hubert van den Berg and Walter Fähnders, ‘Einleitung’, in Metzler Lexikon Avantgarde, ed. by Hubert van den Berg and Walter Fähnders (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag, 2009), pp. 1–19 (p. 17). Carlos Rincón has criticized the traditional understanding of the avant-garde as particularly questioning the boundaries between art and life from a postcolonial perspective and transposes the avant-garde conception into a theory that focuses less on temporalities and more on spaces. Thus, he pleads for shifting attention towards transfers and cultural spaces and for taking a ‘topo-politics’ as a starting point that takes into account both the circulation of ideas and cultural differences. See Carlos Rincón, ‘Avantgarden in Lateinamerika’, in Der Blick vom Wolkenkratzer. Avantgarde — Avantgardekritik — Avantgardeforschung, ed. by Wolfgang Asholt and Walter Fähnders (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 207–29 (pp. 209–10). See also Partisan Canons, ed. by Anna Brzyski (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). ↵
  48. Barr’s tree is atypical — schematic, without any figurative resemblance, the chronology proceeding downward, and the diverse art currents simplified into two principles. ↵
  49. De la Barra, ‘“Diagrama Tropical” Bananas Poster’. ↵
  50. Covarrubias arrived in New York in 1923 as an attaché to the Mexican consulate and became famous there thanks to his caricatures in magazines like Vogue, Word and The New Yorker; he also had solo exhibitions and published his works in books. See Schmidt-Burkhardt, Stammbäume der Kunst, p. 293. ↵
  51. The tree chart was printed on the dust jacket of the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition catalogue in 1936. The catalogue can be downloaded at the following website: <https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_2748_300086869.pdf>. ↵
  52. Voss, ‘Wer schreibt die Kunstgeschichte?’, p. 19. In Stammbäume der Kunst, p. 163, Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt notes with respect to Barr’s tree chart that it is oriented ‘exclusively on art-immanent characteristics’. It shows the ‘self-referential system that develops according to its own internal dynamic’. Ibid., p. 291. Schmidt-Burkhardt also sees Reinhardt as a description based on purely stylistic history. ↵
  53. Ad Reinhardt, ‘How to Look at Modern Art in America’, 1946, P.M., 6.299 (2 July 1946), p. 13. ↵
  54. For the examples of Barr, Covarrubias, and Reinhardt discussed here, see also Christian Kravagna, Transmoderne. Eine Kunstgeschichte des Kontakts (Berlin: b_books, 2019), pp. 222–26. ↵
  55. See Figure 14, quotation written in the caricature. ↵
  56. Termeer, Das Treibhaus und die sozialen Konstruktionen von Fremdheit, p. 133. Across most of the Americas, in particular in the cosmogonies of the indigenous Maya, maize has had a mythological and world-creating role through cultural history, for instance in the Popol Vuh, a book recounting the mythology and history of the Kiché Maya, describing how the first humans were made of maize. See Holley Moyes, Allen J. Christenson, and Frauke Sachse, The Myths of the Popol Vuh in Cosmology, Art, and Ritual (Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2021). The writer Miguel Ángel Asturias reworked the myth in the novel Hombres de Maiz (1949, English: Men of Maize); the Mexican feminist artist collective Mamaz (Mujeres, Artistas, y el Maíz) uses artistic protest forms to spiritually enhance maize, otherwise traded globally as an abstract commodity, and praise it as a fundamental pillar of food and nutrition, e.g. El Maíz es nuestra Vida at the X Bienal de la Habana (2009), see ‘VIDEO “EL MAIZ ES NUESTRA VIDA”’, 30 August 2009, MAMAZ Collective <http://colectivomamaz.blogspot.com/2009/08/blog-post.html>. ↵
  57. Cf. Tiffany Elena Washington, ‘Selling Art in the Age of Retail Expansion and Corporate Patronage: Associated American Artists and the American Art Market of the 1930s and 1940s’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, 2013) <http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1349292575> [accessed 17 January 2025]. ↵
  58. There may be another double entendre lurking in the term ‘tropicalize’: from trope, literally meaning a turn, a figurative or metaphorical use of a word, thus hinting towards a resemanticization. The term ‘radicality’ can also be read as a ‘re-rooting’ or a reinterpretation from the roots, the origins. ↵
  59. The current virtual exhibition Bananacraze, curated and researched by Juanita Solano and Blanca Serrano, hosted by Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, aims to present how the banana ‘has shaped the past and present of a continent, and how this phenomena [sic] finds expression through culture’ <https://bananacraze.uniandes.edu.co/language/en/> [accessed 5 April 2022]. It presents more than 100 Latin American and Latinx artistic articulations dealing with the banana and its social, political, cultural, identity-related, and historical legacies. By 2012, an on-site exhibition by the Novo Museo Tropical showed the ‘Banana Museum’ with many banana-related artworks in the art space Fundación ARS TEOR/éTica, San José, Costa Rica. See Pablo León de la Barra, ‘Novo Museo Tropical Presents “Museo Banana” and “Cinema Tropical” at Teoretica in Costa Rica, a Project by Pablo León de la Barra’, Centre for Aesthetic Revolution, 15 August 2012 <http://centrefortheaestheticrevolution.blogspot.com/2012/08/novo-museo-tropical-presents-museo.html> [accessed 21 January 2025]. In 2011, Pablo León de la Barra had conceptualized and curated the 1st Gran Bienal Tropical in San Juan, Puerto Rico as a radical ‘tropical’ interpretation and non-commercial understanding of the globalized biennials boom. See Pablo León de la Barra, ‘1st Gran Bienal Tropical, “Tropico Abierto” Curated by Pablo León de la Barra at La Comai in San Juan, Puerto Rico’, Centre for Aesthetic Revolution, 11 December 2011 <http://centrefortheaestheticrevolution.blogspot.com/2011/12/1st-bienal-tropical-tropico-abierto-at.html> [accessed 21 January 2025]. For a critical perspective on the globalized model of the art biennial, see Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, ‘Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global’, Third Text, 27.4 (2013), pp. 442–55 <https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.810892>. ↵
  60. Susana Chávez Silverman and Frances R. Aparicio, ‘Introduction’, in Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad, ed. by Susana Chávez Silverman and Frances R. Aparicio (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England / Dartmouth College, 1997), pp. 1–17 (p. 12). ↵
  61. De la Barra, ‘“Diagrama Tropical” Bananas Poster’. ↵
  62. Chávez Silverman and Aparicio, ‘Introduction’, in Tropicalizations, p. 12. ↵
  63. In English, the text reads: ‘When museums and cultural centres outside of the hegemonic art centres remain empty | because they don’t have budget for a programme or curators; | When artists living in the semiperipheries produce specifically for the international market, art fairs and biennales, while ignoring their local public and contexts, or while abusing of their local public and context; | When art produced elsewhere is bought legally (without looting as in the past) by international patrons and museums; | Shouldn’t we rethink the kind of ‘art’ we do? | Shouldn’t we rethink the kind of exhibitions we produce? | Shouldn’t we rethink the kind of museums we aspire to have? | Novo Museo Tropical, a museum without walls. | An invitation to rethink the museum outside the centre. | Being Tropical is not about location it’s about attitude. | If you have any friends that we overlooked, there are some extra bananas. Fill in…’ ↵
  64. See Pablo León de la Barra, ‘1st Gran Bienal Tropical, “Tropico Abierto” Curated by Pablo León de la Barra at La Comai in San Juan, Puerto Rico’, Centre for Aesthetic Revolution (11 December 2011) <http://centrefortheaestheticrevolution.blogspot.com/2011/12/1st-bienal-tropical-tropico-abierto-at.html> [accessed 1 February 2024]. ↵
  65. See notes 11 and 12. ↵
  66. Artistic tropicalization thus also stands in the tradition of the antropofagia movement developed in Brazil in the 1920s, which proposed to invert ascriptions of cannibalism to the ‘savages’ and adopted a strategy to ‘devour’ ‘Western’, hegemonic cultures, reinterpret them, and turn them into tools for their own benefit. The Movimento Antropofágico builds on Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago (Revista de Antropofagia, 1928). Cf. Núcleo Histórico: Antropofagia e Histórias de Canibalismos, exh. cat. XXIV Bienal de São Paulo (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1998); also see Kalinca Costa Söderlund, ‘Antropofagia: An Early Arrière-Garde Manifestation in 1920s Brazil’, in Southern Modernisms, ed. by Joana Cunha Leal and Begoña Farré Torras, special issue of RIHA Journal (2016) <https://doi.org/10.11588/riha.2016.1.70198> [accessed 5 April 2022]. ↵
  67. Andrea Giunta wrote about such ‘Strategies of Modernity in Latin America’ as ‘irritative, subversive, and activist’ (‘Strategies of Modernity in Latin America’, p. 312). Namely, ‘she describes three distinct strategies — “swallowing”, “inversion”, and “re-appropriation” — associated with three episodes in the development of Latin American avant-gardes: Brazilian Oswald de Andrade’s “Anthropophagite [Cannibalist] Manifesto” and the painting that inspired it, Tarsila do Amaral’s Abaporú, both from 1928, which called for “swallowing” or cannibalizing the dominant discourse; Uruguayan Joaquín Torres-García’s foundation of the School of the South in 1943 and his iconic Inverted Map (1935), which tactically reversed established hierarchies of Euro-US over Latin American art; and Cuban Wifredo Lam’s painting La Jungla (1943), which turned Western modernism’s myth of originality inside out by a re-appropriation of primitivist appropriation’ (p. 302, introduction to the text by the editors). ↵
  68. See Chávez Silverman and Aparicio, ‘Introduction’, in Tropicalizations, p. 12. ↵
  69. Noël, Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism, p. 3. Noël proposes an ‘alternative understanding of the tropics’ through an ‘investigation of how Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century responded to the colonial and hegemonic regimes through visual and performative tropicalist representation’ (p. 4). She continues, ‘This ideological heeding of nature should be viewed as an alternative modernity that counters the idea of transforming “undeveloped” nature for the sake of capitalist expansion. In so doing, there is a particular political enterprise at stake, one that dissociates the land with the history of slavery and thereby reclaims it’ (pp. 5–6). ↵
  70. Ibid., p. 4. ↵
  71. Ibid., pp. 5–6. ↵
  72. The Tropicália movement in Brazil (c. 1967–72), with Hélio Oiticica taking an active part, referred back to antropofagia (see note 66) as a conscious inversion of stereotypes onto the ‘tropical’ regions and its art production into a self-determined claim for the periphery as centred; see Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium, ed. by Elizabeth Sussman, James Rondeau, and Donna M. de Salvo (Munich: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2016); Irina Hiebert Grun, Strategien der Einverleibung. Die Rezeption der Antropofagia in der zeitgenössischen brasilianischen Kunst (Bielefeld: transcript, 2020); Carlos Basualdo, ‘Tropicália: Avant-Garde, Popular Culture, and the Culture Industry in Brazil’, in Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture, 1967–1972, ed. by Carlos Basualdo (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2005), pp. 11–28. ↵
  73. See also Terry Smith, ‘Coda: Canons and Contemporaneity’, in Partisan Canons, ed. by Anna Brzyski (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 309–26, emphasizing the relevance of situatedness for canon constructions and reconstructions: ‘A strategic insistence on the canonical status of local initiatives can be a successful partisan strategy — partisan in the sense of politically partial, passionate, and resistant’ (p. 320). ↵
  74. For more information, see K. David Jackson, Cannibal Angels — Transatlantic Modernism and the Brazilian Avant-Garde (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021); Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil, exh. cat. The Art Institute of Chicago, ed. by Stephanie d’Alessandro and Luis Pérez-Oramas (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2017); Lena Bader, ‘Hunger nach dem Anderen. Antropofagia oder die Lust am Verschlingen der Bilder’, arthistoricum (28 October 2020) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.11588/​artdok.00007103>. ↵
  75. See Walter Mignolo’s critique of ‘modernity’ as a Western construct from a decolonial perspective. He applies 1492, when Columbus landed in the Caribbean and started the process of colonization of the Americas, as the foundational historical moment in which ‘modernity’ began, as colonialism and modernity are inextricably tied to each other: Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Also see the reference to Andrea Giunta’s analysis of ‘swallowing’ in note 67. ↵
  76. I use Leslie Bary’s translation of the manifesto into English, see ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’, trans. by Leslie Bary, Latin American Literary Review, 19.38 (July–December 1991), pp. 38–47 (p. 39) <http://www.jstor.org/stable/20119601> [accessed 1 February 2024]. ↵
  77. Hélio Oiticica, ‘Tropicália (4 March 1968)’, in Art in Theory: The West in the World; an Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. by Paul Wood, Leon Wainwright, and Charles Harrison (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2021), pp. 756–58 (p. 758). ↵
  78. Cf. André Masseno, A trama tropical. Capítulos da (contra)cultura brasileira (Belo Horizonte: Relicário, Edições 2022). ↵
  79. On the Western logic of plant classifications through botanical names, see Anna Pavord, The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005). ↵
  80. See the text that relates Rosana Paulino’s work: <https://bananacraze.uniandes.edu.co/language/en/obras/art,identities,violences/rosana-paulino-3/> [accessed 1 February 2024]. ↵
  81. For the colonialist contexts of azulejos, see Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age, exh. cat. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA/Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, ed. by Karina H. Corrigan, Jan van Campen, and Femke Diercks, with Janet C. Blyberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). ↵
  82. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (London: continuum, 2004 [Mille Plateaux, Paris 1980]). ↵
  83. Ibid., p. 15. See also, ‘A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive’ (ibid., p. 7); and ‘Transversal communications between different lines scramble the genealogical trees. […] The rhizome is an antigenealogy’ (ibid., p. 11). ↵
  84. See Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2007). ↵
  85. I would like to add that I find the purely quantitative approach also problematic, because it blends out differences in content and ignores the level on which art ‘touches’ us and can speak to us emotionally — perhaps globally also the most remarkable and wonderful potential of works of art — elevating art production to the solely valid criterion of comparison: ‘A more rational literary history. That is the idea.’ Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, p. 19. ↵
  86. Giunta, ‘Strategies of Modernity in Latin America’, p. 313. ↵
  87. See for example Eija Maria Ranta, Vivir Bien as an Alternative to Neoliberal Globalization: Can Indigenous Terminologies Decolonize the State? Rethinking Globalizations (London: Routledge, 2018) <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315180441>; Indigenous People and Nature — Insights for Social, Ecological, and Technological Sustainability, ed. by Uday Chatterjee and others (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2022); Julia Watson, Lo-Tek: Design by Radical Indigenism (Cologne: Taschen, 2019); Indigenous Resurgence: Decolonialization and Movements for Environmental Justice, ed. by Jaskiran Dhillon (Berghahn Books, 2022) <https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.15213782>; Cohabitation, exh. cat. silent green Berlin, ed. by Marion von Osten and others (Berlin: Arch+, 2022). ↵
  88. Devenir Universidad <https://deveniruniversidad.org/en/home/> [accessed 6 December 2022]. See also Ursula Biemann, Forest Mind: On the Interconnection of All Life (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2022). ↵
  89. See the film essay, Ursula Biemann: Forest Mind, 2021, DigitalHD, OV/e, 32 min <https://vimeo.com/57902146>. ↵
  90. Devenir Universidad <https://deveniruniversidad.org/en/home/> [accessed 6 December 2022]. ↵
  91. With reference to ‘intrarelations’ I refer also to Karen Barad’s concept of ‘intra-actions’, see Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). ↵
  92. Birgit Hopfener and Ming Tiampo, ‘Worlding Global Art Histories’, Texte zur Kunst, 128, ‘Art History Update’ (December 2022), pp. 146–51 (italics mine). ↵
  93. Ibid. ↵
  94. See Grant Jun Otsuki and others, ‘Introduction’, in The World Multiple: The Quotidian Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds, ed. by Otsuki and others (London: Routledge, 2019); Sasha Su-Ling Welland, Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), p. 40: ‘Worldings […] are practices that are always partial and incomplete on their own. Conversely, worldings may be polyvalent, generating the conditions of possibility for more than one world at the same time. They are unstable in their form and effects, and open to critique, resignification, and transformation.’ ↵

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