Positional note
I am a white, German, able-bodied cis-woman doing a PhD at a university in the South of Europe with the experience of growing up in a working-class milieu. In my work, I commit to the study of visual cultural, critical historiography in education and post-colonial, decolonial and feminist theory. I am particularly invested in images and imaginaries of 'nature' and the ways they are producing a hegemonic relations with the world and its beings.
“During the Renaissance and most of the eighteenth century, it was not the nature immediately around them [the English romanticists] that they most prized, but the exotic natures that came from elsewhere. Nature first appeared primarily as a colonial import, an increasingly important part of the luxury trade. Parrots and parakeets, minerals and fossils, shells, corals and nautilus cups, were avidly collected for the cabinets of the wealthy. In the seventeenth-century Holland this activity gave rise to an art genre, the pronck still-life paintings. Those paintings not only portray the grouping of rare and costly things, but they also enact the pleasure of visually dwelling on such luxuries” (Bewell, 2004, p. 15).
This image of the picture book series A instrucção da creança borrows from the pronck still-life paintings that, as Bewell states, linked the commercialization and exoticisation of ‘nature’ through colonial trade to the artistic realm in central European countries. The image in the picture book series is accompanied by a text that asks the child if she had ever encountered those fruits, bushes and trees – possibly when her father bought them from the sellers in the city. The commercialization of ‘nature’ not only as produce but as luxury goods is set in urban environments. Did Staub’s question make sense to a child who was living in close proximity with agricultural work? Considering that the picture book series travelled from Switzerland to Portugal while the images remained identical, I am pondering: Did the orange and the figs arranged lavishly in the image invoke the same connotations of exoticism and luxury in the Portuguese context as in the Swiss?