Vvzela Kook

Columbus of Horticulture

Columbus of Horticulture stems from Vvzela Kook’s ongoing research into the central and often-ignored role that botany played in the history of European imperialism. The colonial project, with its maritime explorations and voyages, was for the most part centred around the profits made from the discovery and exploitation of valuable plants (or from the kidnapping of the people needed to work on them). Vegetal products thus constituted a great part of the volume of the colonial economy, from spices to drugs, from textile fibres and dyes to tea, coffee, or cocoa. Hong Kong with its double original sin steeped in tea and opium is an excellent example of that global trafficking. Kook focuses on the British colonial “plant hunter,” the figure who searches the Empire’s lands for hidden precious plants and seeds to be brought back to the royal botanical gardens. These institutions were themselves important sites in the process of plant trafficking, as stations for acclimatisation and study of species before their introduction to other continents. But they were also shrines where exoticism was performed and displayed, an important drive in the process of exploration, a horizon of desire arousing fantasies of domination, as well as a selling strategy for the colonial experience at home, both for the sake of political support and out of the very practical need to raise capital for colonial banditry expeditions. The pace of Kook’s animation, the virtual flow of overlaying images, endless people and plants, combine to construct a hallucinatory space evoking that crucial allusion to the exotic. While the work imagines a fictional island, accompanying objects encased in glass vitrines model actual (albeit distorted) botanical specimens such as rubber tree, tea tree, and orchid, all connected with the colonization of South America, India, and Hong Kong.