ARCHIVO READING GROUP

Thinking through Ecology, Archives,

Photography and their Correlations

DR VANESSA BADAGLIACCA

This reading session proposes a dialogue between three texts that, in different ways, attempt to question the same terms Ecology, Archive, and Photography, and their non-neutrality. In so doing, Malcom Ferdinand, in his Decolonial Ecology. Thinking from the Caribbean World (2022) makes us embark on a voyage towards a place from which he turns possible for us to see how ecology and colonialism are entangled and underscores the importance of a decolonial ecology as a way “to hold together antislavery, anticolonialism, and environmentalism together”. Similarly, Banu Subramaniam, in her Botany of Empire. Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism (2024) notes that science did not emerge alongside colonialism, but rather developed for and in support of empire, and proposes a science that results from interdisciplinary work with feminist studies, towards a process of learning and unlearning. She suggests opening up the archives to ask different questions and “to find the tools and freedom to imagine knowledge anew”.

Digging into the connections between science, the archive, photography, in Klara and the Bomb (2022), Crystal Bennes combines archival research with her own practice as photographer to question the role played not only by the protagonist of her book, but also by women in science at the time of the early 20th-century “nuclear tests.” What does ecology mean and for whom? How can we uncover information through the omissions within the archive, and what do these silences reveal? How can photography (and more broadly, the image) contribute to or not to make the margins, the interstices, the center of a narrative?

Dr Vanessa Badagliacca is an art historian. Her academic research and curatorial practice explore the entanglements between plant life, environmental issues and artistic practices, with an approach informed by the sciences, ecocriticism and new materialisms, focusing mainly on the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America in a transnational perspective.

She contributes regularly with her writings in academic journals, art magazines, exhibition catalogues, and independent publications. She holds a PhD in Art History from Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and currently is a research fellow at the department of History of Art and Musicology at the University of Oviedo.

More information:

Reading Materials are available at the Archivo Intranet.