At first glance, Uriel Orlow’s show “What Plants Were Called Before They Had a Name (Guatemala)” seemed serene and innocuous. Panels of canvas hung from the ceiling, with illustrations of plants projected onto them by old-fashioned overhead projectors whose light emanating from them bathed the entire room in a warm glow. Each projection showed a single page from a publication on medicinal plants published in the 1970s by the Instituto Indigenista de Guatemala, with a sketch of the plant and a list of ailments it could treat, along with its name in Spanish. . Each entry is interrupted by scruffy handwritten notes: several names in different languages, peppered with divergent spellings and inflections, as inscribed by Maya spirit guides whom Orlow asked to annotate the book after noting the lack of indigenous voices. These practitioners, who might be considered charlatans by Western science, thus become the unorthodox authors of an alternative narrative.
Reconstructing a battle between conflicting epistemologies, this exhibition extended Orlow’s long-term research on plants, a larger project called “Theatrum Botanicum”, as entities that exert influence over cultures, geographies and modes of understanding. Her work draws attention to the social, ecological, and epistemic injustices caused by colonialism, while contextualizing the production of scientific knowledge within the Indigenous experience of loss and erasure. While claiming to rely on empiricism and objectivity, Western science defends the values and prejudices of the society from which it comes, thus propagating an ahistorical worldview concerned with standardizing modes of knowledge through classifications. and rigid hierarchies. This bias translates into the prioritization of surveys that support Western technologies and economies that threaten marginalized communities and the planet. By juxtaposing the records of indigenous learning with an official Spanish narrative, Orlow challenges methodologies that claim to eliminate discrepancies and arrive at an infallible universal truth about the nature of things. The doodles on the projected pages reminded us that there are many ways of naming, and reinstituted these multiplicities as necessary elements rather than hindrances to scholarship.
In one corner of the exhibit, a single-channel video offered visual documentation of Orlow’s collaboration with the spiritual guides he encountered on his travels through Guatemala. Without subtitles, only the faint murmur emanating from the screen could have compelled the average Nepali viewer, like me, to listen to the words spoken by the guides without fully understanding them. Can this incomprehensibility reverse the violence that permeates our attempts to make everything understandable?
As part of the fifth edition of Photo Kathmandu, the Orlow exhibition co-occurred with the “Indigenous Knowledge Portal” of KTK-BELT, a project run by young people from eastern Nepal who use new media to store and share farmers’ knowledge of indigenous medicinal plants. This year’s festival called for exploring ways of thinking, feeling and relating to the non-human world, beyond the grand apocalyptic narrative that heralds impending ecological disaster. Together, “What Plants Were Called Before They Had a Name (Guatemala)” and the “Indigenous Knowledge Portal” signaled the re-emergence of non-hegemonic micro-narratives and non-Eurocentric nomenclature as starting points for constructing a socially and ecologically equitable world. They stood in solidarity against the mutilation of Indigenous heritages by remembering what has been erased and speaking out what has been silenced.
