Introduction

The visual arts have played an integral role in the collection, identification, study, and exhibition of flora and fauna since the earliest times. The introduction traces ways in which art has participated in the construction of knowledge about the New World in particular, drawing on relevant recent scholarship by Daniela Bleichmar, Mauricio Nieto Olarte, and Juan Pimentel, among others. It focuses on how animal and plant life in Latin America were documented by chroniclers of the early colonial period, in the great scientific expeditions of the Enlightenment, and in museum exhibition practices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The introduction outlines how the more recent artworks studied in this book develop a critique of the Enlightenment’s quest for a universal scientific language, searching instead to pluralize epistemologies. Returning to technologies of knowledge that were often designed to yield greater objectivity and universalism, Latin American artists have adapted these for different purposes: to reentwine natural history with human history, to historicize a timeless and universal nature, and to reconnect modern science with forms of knowledge it has marginalized since the eighteenth century. These techniques allow them to intervene critically in debates about environmental change and to explore decolonial and post-anthropocentric perspectives on the relationships between humans and the natural world.