3. Floras, Herbaria, and Botanical Illustration

New World plants were exhaustively catalogued in the floras and herbaria produced by the great scientific expeditions led by European naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Granada (1783–1816), directed by José Celestino Mutis. Species were primarily illustrated in a way that would allow their identification according to Linnaean taxonomies. Three contemporary artists from Colombia—Alberto Baraya, María Fernanda Cardoso and Eulalia de Valdenebro—have reworked the Enlightenment norms of botanical illustration in order to draw attention to their many erasures and to chart environmental change over the past two centuries. Baraya’s Herbario de plantas artificiales (2002–) celebrates the anomalies and aberrations that were smoothed out in the European quest for a universal system of classification, exposing the relationship between modern Western science and the dynamics of economic and cultural dispossession. De Valdenebro’s seed collections contrast the homogenization and commercialization of transgenic varieties with the greater biodiversity of native seeds, whose cultivation has unfolded within a much higher degree of reciprocity between humans and their environment. In On the Marriages of Plants (2018), Cardoso reflects on Linnaeus’s use of sexual terms borrowed from the human world in her exploration of more recent research into reciprocal relationships between plants, insects, and humans. I bring these projects into dialogue with a selection of illustrations by Abel Rodríguez (Mogaje Guihu), an artist whose work preserves the ancestral knowledge of the Nonuya and Muinane communities in the Colombian Amazon. Contrasting with Linnaean abstraction, Rodríguez’s drawings and paintings depict rainforest ecosystems in ways that cast light on Amazonian concepts of cohabitation and the co-constitution of human and nonhuman subjects. These enter into conflict with two dominant Western paradigms: extraction, on the one hand, and conservation, on the other.