“One by one the planet’s life forms were to be drawn out of the tangled threads of their life surroundings and rewoven into European-based patterns of global unity and order. The (lettered, male, European) eye that held the system could familiarize (‘naturalize’) new sites/sights immediately upon contact, by incorporating them into the language of the system. The differences of distance factored themselves out of the picture: with respect to mimosas, Greece could be the same as Venezuela, West Africa or Japan; the label ‘granitic peaks’ can apply identically to Eastern Europe, the Andes, or the American West” (Pratt, 1992, p. 31).
What Mary Louise Pratt describes, the universalization of space and the eradication of local difference, actualizes in a peculiar way through the travelling of Johannes Staub’s picture book series A instrucção da creança from Switzerland (1875/6) to Portugal (1904/5). While the accompanying texts were translated from German into Portuguese, the images remained identical. Flipping through the pages of the books for the first time, I felt a strange dislocation. Sharp mountains with snowy tops and frozen lakes on which families and children ice-skate is evidently a place located in an alpine region. How did these images make sense in Portugal? Did the children learn about the more-than-human world of the central European alpine region as ‘the nature’, as singular and universal? Did the teachers and parents (re-)contextualize the images? The dislocation of these (images of) landscapes is a telling commentary about the notion of a universal ‘nature’ in which local specificities did not matter (as much), or at least did not hinder these images from travelling.
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.