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.
The image I have chosen from Staub’s picture book series A instrucção da creança represents the more-than-human world through drawings of plants as common to the natural history of the 18th and 19th centuries. Visual parameters figured strongly as tools to identify the taxonomy of plants in the project of natural history based on the Linnean system (Pratt, 1992, p. 25). The overall acclaimed mission statement was: “making order out of chaos” (Pratt, 1992, p. 25).
The isolated visual elements are composed in a bright juxtaposition, side by side, each on their own. The clear delineation of each entity against the backdrop of the blank page and the distance between each entity allows for a gaze that can differentiate one from the other. This visual convention and standardization placed animals and plants on an empty page almost as if objects in a cabinet drawer (Bleichmar, 2007, p. 180). It is not only a displacement of ‘nature’ but a decontextualization (Bleichmar, 2007, p. 180). Just like the cabinet, the blank page is also an exhibition mechanism; one that displaces and renders irrelevant both local specificities and the relationality that vibrates in the more-than-human world.
Some of the plants are displayed with their roots, others fade out into the page at the stem; a few of the plants are drawn in different stages of blossoming. Bleichmar argues that such a representation became common due to the conditions of expeditions in colonized parts of the world, where European scientists/artists had to rush due to the travel speed and as a means of efficiency sketched one plant in various stages (Bleichmar, 2006, p. 90).