A review of the Oboro exhibition by Fabiano Kueva and curator Emmanuelle Choquette, the Montreal stage of the “Humboldt effect” that Kueva has been pursuing for over ten years.
Read moreSince 2011, Ecuadorian artist, curator and director Fabiano Kueva has been working on a multidisciplinary project based on the voyages of Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, who left Europe between 1799 and 1804 to explore America. These historic scientific expeditions proved fundamental in the construction of an imaginary linked to territories outside Europe, and to the concepts of nature and anthropology on which the institutions of knowledge such as scientific collections, botanical gardens and museums are based.
Kueva re-enacts Von Humboldt’s posture, assembling an extensive cabinet of curiosities that is accompanied by a series of films entitled Ensayo Geopoético (Geopoetic Essays) (2011 – still in progress.). This work has been presented on several occasions, including in Berlin at the opening of the Humboldt Forum in 2020. Each of these iterations gives rise to an adaptation of the project in relation to its host location. Most recently, the exhibition at OBORO, curated by Emmanuelle Choquette, benefited from the artist’s privileged access to the collections of the Marie-Victorin Herbarium, and also includes reproductions of illustrations on the First Peoples of Canada by 18th-century French diplomat and draughtsman Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur.
In the main room, the artist presents objects, reproductions and images, both ancient and contemporary, artifacts and natural specimens gleaned, modified or entirely fabricated. In this way, natural science and archaeological knowledge supports are mixed with tourist souvenirs, reiterating the folkloric conceptions that the former sometimes help to convey. The layout, which borrows various display devices from museography, including salon-style hanging, cabinets and display cases, even makes use of the storage shelves typical of museum collections. In this way, the museum reveals itself to be a powerful machine endowed with significant rhetorical means, evolving in the service of a certain vision of the world, shaped here by an imaginary linked to the scientific expeditions of the 18th and 19th centuries.
A projection entitled Todas las plantas del mundo (2012-2023), featuring Kueva as Humboldt, wearing old-fashioned clothes or tropical shirts representative of the “Humboldt effect” he is tracking down, is also included. The film is a critical and humorous re-reading of Humboldt and Bonpland’s journey of “discovery” of the New World, documenting the artist’s research for this purpose in botanical gardens, museums and libraries on both sides of the Atlantic. This cinematic docu-drama captures the imaginary world of the two explorers, conveying a reductive conception of the Caribbean, Central and South America. At the very end, the labyrinths of the Mercado Gamarra, a popular market in Lima, appear as reminiscences of ancient indigenous cultures, representing resistance in the face of standardized scientific knowledge.
In contrast to the journeys of Humboldt and Bonpland, and in more or less the same territories, the Humboldt Archive in Kueva, of which the OBORO exhibition is a stage, highlights the tensions and effects of these historic scientific explorations, in the service of a knowledge economy as much as a market economy, and bears witness to the globalized nature of the imaginary territory they helped to shape.
Translated with DeepL.com