Dr Nora Galland
MSCA Seal of Excellence
Postdoctoral Fellowship @Unipd
The website “Botanical Circulations: Race, Plants & Empire” is part of the research project “SOW 16-17” for “Seeds of Whiteness in Early Modern Europe: Ecology, Race and Ethnicity” financed by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Padova e Rovigo and Università di Padova (Italy), conducted under the supervision of Prof. Rocco Coronato.
SOW 16-17 investigates how whiteness was conceptualized and naturalized through early modern ecological practices. It examines how botanical science, colonial ecology, and racial epistemologies co-emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries. Its main goal is to reveal how whiteness – as a mode of epistemic and material domination – was encoded, naturalized, and circulated through early modern practices of plant collection, naming, cultivation, and visual representation. This project pioneers a transdisciplinary approach that brings together critical race theory, postcolonial ecocriticism, archival studies, and digital humanities to construct a new theoretical framework for understanding the ecological foundations of race in the early modernity. SOW 16-17 directly responds to current global conversations about decolonizing the curriculum, environmental and social justice, and the coloniality of science. Precisely, it offers historical depth to debates on the racial and ecological logics of contemporary environmental crises.
The rationale behind the SOW 16-17 logo…
French artist Eléonore Baer designed this logo which is a anthotype, produced thanks to an alternative photographic printing technique that uses plant pigments as a light-sensitive medium. Flowers, leaves, berries, and other botanical materials are crushed or extracted, spread onto paper, and exposed to sunlight, allowing the pigments themselves to produce an image. Here it has been done with turmeric, hence the orange color.
Here, the plant becomes an active material in the production of the image. Photography is thus transformed into a botanical process, where sunlight, pigment, paper, and plant matter collaborate to create a unique image.
By replacing industrial photographic chemistry with vegetal matter, the anthotype also offers a practice of decentering conventional technologies of representation. The botanical specimen becomes a medium, an agent, and a site of transformation.
The anthotype therefore operates as both image and method: it transforms botanical matter into a photographic medium while transforming photography itself into a way of questioning how nature has been represented, circulated, and controlled.