ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Botany and Decolonial Methods in the Arts

• In Event: Collection Stories and Indo-Pacific worlds 2

English Abstract

This proposal explores how artistic practices grounded in ecological inquiry can decolonize ways of knowing and relating to vegetal life. Working and reflecting through three projects that I engage in, Recalling Forgotten Tastes, Measure of Seeds and Roots and Ruins, the paper examines how plants embody the intertwined histories of colonial extraction, global trade, and indigenous ecological knowledge. Through Recalling Forgotten Tastes, I investigate the Orang Asli’s relational ethics with land and forest, highlighting how indigenous plant knowledge is inextricably linked to maintaining reciprocal relationships in a multicrisis world. Foregrounding plants as agents, collaborators, and witnesses to historical and environmental transformations, the proposal develops an approach attentive to what may be called vegetal bodies: living archives that retain traces of ecological memory and displacement. Measure of Seeds traces colonial plantations and their contemporary echoes in seed monopolies and food insecurity, using the circulation of seeds and species as a method to track human and nonhuman migrations that continue to shape postcolonial landscapes in Malaya/sia and beyond. In contrast, Roots and Ruins and its paired body of work No Roads without Trees examine Kuala Lumpur’s urban ecologies through walking practices with arborists to uncover the layered entanglements of heritage preservation, climate change, and local governance. By approaching the politics of human and more-than-human relations through Malaysia’s dense histories of colonial botany and urban transformation, this paper considers how art can cultivate recombinant ecologies and offer decolonial methods for reimagining multispecies futures.

Author

• Syarifah Nadhirah, SOAS, University of London