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Unsettled Bodies. Nature at War

site specific audio and visual installation, 2019

Unsettled Bodies. Nature at War is an installation on the relationship between colonised landscapes and their spatial translation in European cities. The landscape design for the Peace Palace in The Hague symbolised international harmony but largely comprised rhododendrons and azaleas appropriated from the colonies. In the 19th century, the engineering of cinchona plants for the production of anti- malarial drugs improved imperial survival in India. Java became the worldwide production centre for antimalarial medicines. Alkaloids - either held in cinchona barks produced in plantations, or injected in the blood of immunized soldiers - proliferated in parallel to the propagation of colonial occupation. Combining archival material and newly produced work, the installation examines these multi-species, entangled acts of landscaping and colonization that enabled azaleas to return to the Metropole as symbols of the Western ideal of Peace.



Read the audio-script here