(Un)natural Archives: Botanical Gardens, Photography, and Postcards
- Constance Koh
- Jun 22, 2021
- 9 min read
Updated: Mar 30
This paper examines contemporary Singaporean artist Marvin Tang’s project The Colony – Archive (2019), a part of his ongoing research The Colony (2018–). The Colony – Archive takes as its point of departure the homogeneity of botanical landscapes across various colonies as observed from old postcards, which evidences a deep-rooted colonial legacy in Singapore’s national narrative. This essay investigates these artificial landscapes and the power relations captured by three archival modes: botanical gardens, photography, and postcards. Applying Michel Foucault’s (1926-84) concept of ‘heterotopias’ to these archival modes, this paper posits that they foreground the tension between human intervention and natural history, instating the artist-archivist as an authorial figure who produces new archival images rewriting the social memory surrounding botanical gardens. Tang’s production, (re)presentation, and dissemination of archival images is understood as a subversion of the persistent structures of power and control enacted by botanical gardens. Situating these ideas in relation to Singapore’s nature-centric national identity, The Colony – Archive engages with discussions charting the future of the independent nation and reclaiming its agency through its natural landscape.
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The botanical gardens which proliferated in multiple British colonies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought together specimens deemed profitable from all over the world, moving an immense amount of plants across the former British Empire while radically transforming ecological and geographical landscapes. Native species were replaced and landscapes homogenised across colonies, with imported specimens cultivated to fulfil the metropole’s agendas. As colonial institutions of research, established for scientific and economic gain, and subsequently represented as utopic, timeless spaces in colonial-era postcards, botanical gardens are crucial archives of the agendas of the former British Empire. They have also left an indelible mark on the historical narratives of the former colonies in which they were established. They are therefore sites which not only enable the production of knowledge, but also reveal the power relations inherent in this process. In botanical gardens, specimens extracted from their native environments congregate with others with they have little or nothing in common with. They therefore demonstrate how colonial efforts co-opt temporal and geographical boundaries to expand colonial power. The French philosopher Michel Foucault identified gardens as ‘heterotopias’ in his essay ‘Of Other Spaces’, as they juxtapose ‘several sites that are in themselves incompatible’ and enclose a ‘perceptual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place’.[1] Contemporary Singaporean artist Marvin Tang’s ongoing project The Colony (2018-) explores the power relations that underlie the production and circulation of, and access to, knowledge of these botanical institutions. This essay will focus on a constituent project: The Colony – Archive (2019, fig 10). By investigating three modes of archival practice which inform the work—botanical gardens, photography, and postcards—this paper posits that The Colony – Archive comes to embody the function and workings of an archive while rewriting the social memory of colonialism. By setting off its own circulation of postcards and taking an active part in knowledge production, this new archive of the present recoups an agency lost under colonialism.
The Colony – Archive takes as its point of departure the homogeneity of natural landscapes in botanical gardens across former British colonies, as observed from old postcards sold at London postcard fairs.[2] When collecting colonial-era postcards of botanical gardens, Tang observed similarities regardless of their locations, be they Singapore or Kandy, Sri Lanka. Specimens such as hevea brasiliensis (para rubber tree) native to Brazil were found throughout former colonies such as Indonesia and Singapore.[3] The work consists of nine sets of postcards displayed on a large canvas. Some are nineteenth-century postcards, and others are created by Tang from photographs of the Singapore Botanical Gardens and London’s Kew Gardens. The postcards are placed in an arbitrary order, each of them numbered at the top corner (figs 1-9), with the exception of figs 3 and 5 which belong to the artist’s personal collection.[4] The canvas which forms the backdrop for the postcards depicts a hilly tropical landscape—half plantation and half forest—capturing the transition from dense, natural forests on the right to neatly terraced plantations on the left, likely cash crops. Beside this display of postcards are two frames (fig 11), comprising an image of a botanical garden and a list of gardens established by Kew, as evident from its title, ‘Established at Home, and in India and in the Colonies’. This amalgamation of images, and the list of gardens, form an archive of colonial agenda enacted through the establishment of botanical gardens and environmental manipulation.
Botanical gardens as heterotopias
Botanical gardens are transnational archives of colonial ecological, scientific, and economic efforts in agriculture and trade, charting the global migration of plant specimens. These curated landscapes were established to support the former British Empire’s scientific research, and its commodification and exploitation of valuable plants for crop cultivation. They were born out of a worldview which regarded ‘the world as its plantation’ and amid efforts to secure resources, profits, and trade monopolies.[5] Singapore, for example, was the optimal testing ground for cultivating nutmeg from Indonesia’s Spice Islands, the Brazilian para rubber tree, and Senegal mahogany trees from Africa, which today are the largest evergreens lining Singapore’s parks and roads.[6] As repositories for a variety of plant specimens from around the world, botanical gardens are, as Foucault called heterotopias, ‘contradictory sites’ which are simultaneously ‘the smallest parcel of the world and … the totality of the world’.[7] However, Tang uses the heterotopic potential of botanical gardens as counter-sites, where real space is ‘simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ to expose and counter established power relations inherent to colonial ideology and institutions.[8] At all times, viewers of The Colony – Archive are confronted with the artificiality of these heavily curated landscapes. The framed list of correspondences between Kew and establishments in the colonies stands in stark contrast to the utopic scene promised by the botanical gardens, foregrounding the deliberate, economic motivations underlying the colonial enterprise. The illusion of a timeless utopia, as perpetuated by the curated compositions and images of the gardens, is shattered against the backdrop of the plantation, alluding to the exploitative nature of the colonial enterprise. Through such a display, a direct relationship is drawn between the two colonial establishments, highlighting their shared commercial purposes. Indeed, these colonial institutions are what Tang calls ‘impossible landscapes: [sites] that would not occur in the wild, in first-hand nature’.[9] Thus, botanical gardens are productions and re-productions of colonial ideology which transcend geographical boundaries. They are archives of the newfound research value attributed to specimens upon entering the exploitative institution of colonialism.
Photographic perspectives
Having discussed the colonial motivations underlying the establishment of botanical gardens and their archival function, we can consider how Tang uses photography to counter the hegemonic colonial narrative represented by botanical gardens. Tang ironically employs the archival value of photography as pictorial testimony to problematise the supposed timelessness promised by botanical gardens and their utopian reproduction in images. As William Henry Fox Talbot speculated in his 1846 book The Pencil of Nature, a photograph can be produced against a thief in court, underscoring its unique potential as a visual document that relays legalistic truth.[10] Tang’s postcards are compositions entirely dominated by an amalgamation of plant specimens, depicted with a deliberate yellowing, ‘vintage’ effect and the addition of noise to the image texture. They thus foreground the manipulative interventions in the creation of the images and gardens, a quality made more blatant by the lack of distinction between the colonial-era postcards. The large canvas captures the liminal landscape in a moment of transition and depletion, from a forested area to the bare, structured terraces of a plantation, showing the symptoms of human intrusion into nature. The staged naturality of botanical gardens presented by the postcards stands in stark contrast to the violent reality of colonialism through which these species came to coexist. Displayed alongside colonial-era postcards, Tang’s postcards reject their status as archives of socio-geographical memory, and instead form a new archive which confronts the artificiality of this constructed landscape. Unlike the ordered list of botanical gardens, which presents a systematised, geographical categorisation, the arbitrary ordering of the photographs, their unidentifiable locations, and their mocking imitation of colonial-era postcards criticise the use of gardens by colonial powers in order to implement systematic homogenisation and exploitation. Hence, through an examination of the use of photography in The Colony – Archive, Tang produces a counter-narrative which exposes and highlights the artificiality of botanical gardens.
Postcards on the move
Moving beyond the subject matter depicted on the postcards, we turn to the modes of dissemination which give postcards their extensive mobility and ambiguous provenance, and how Tang uses these to challenge the hegemonic colonial discourse built into botanical gardens. In Tang’s words, ‘postcards became an easy and accessible way for people to collect the world’ during the Victorian age of exploration.[11] This act of ‘[collecting] the world’ as supported and represented by postcards reinforces a colonial worldview which sought to subsume and assimilate others. This worldview is mirrored in the heterotopias that are botanical gardens. Far from being a democratic medium, then, postcards became a symbol of the exotic. They perpetuated romanticised stereotypes of far-flung lands in Southeast Asia and operated as oppressive symbols affirming the extensive reach of the former British Empire. Indeed, Tang sees the postcard as symptomatic of Ernst van Alphen’s notion that photography and imperialism would meet and collaborate.[12] However, Tang also draws on the ease of transmission of postcards—and hence, their potential as democratised modes of dissemination—to counter the colonial narrative of Southeast Asia.
This resonates with the notion of effective democratisation posed by Jacques Derrida in ‘Archive Fever’, which states that ‘there is no political power without control of the archive … Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation’.[13] Tang uses his own postcards (participation in the archive), provides free access to them in the gallery (access to the archive), operates from the Southeast Asian perspective (constitution), and problematises the colonial worldview which created ‘impossible landscapes’ in the colonies (interpretation). He also uses the ambiguity of postcards which ‘blur the line of where the image was taken [and] the provenance’ to foreground the still-powerful colonial ideology underlying the botanical gardens.[14] Tang’s act of reproducing and numerically classifying the postcards therefore reclaims the referential significance of botanical landscapes as pictures in archival photographs. For Tang as artist-archivist, the act of reproduction not only inserts his postcards into the physical circulation of goods in the economy, but also (re)introduces colonial postcards into the realm of collective social memory. By engaging with social memory, The Colony – Archive effects a ground-up movement that disrupts the still-pervasive effects of colonialism.
From ‘Garden City’ to ‘City in Nature’
Through the three archival modes of the botanical garden, photography, and postcards, The Colony – Archive reveals and subverts the structures of power and control as enacted by the colonial institutions of botanical gardens in former British colonies. Tang draws on the archive of the past to create a new archive of the present. He replaces the former colonial power with the artist-archivist as the authorial figure and producer of archival images, overturning the hierarchy embedded in the creation of these botanical gardens. Elevating this analysis to a consideration of Singapore’s national identity, the work questions Singapore’s ‘garden city’ narrative so famously espoused by founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, and its implications for collective identity. The Singapore Botanical Gardens, nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015, have always played a key role in Singapore’s national narrative and identity, especially in view of Singapore’s founding motto ‘Garden City’, established in 1967.[15] This motto evolved into ‘City in a Garden’ in 2014 and ‘City in Nature’ in 2020, corresponding to more intensive greening and conservation efforts in the city-state.[16] ‘City in a Garden’ evokes an image of Singapore encapsulated by carefully curated nature, which is amplified by its colonial links. The subsequent transition to ‘City in Nature’ not only indicates a shift in Singapore’s greening objectives, but also charts its growing independence from the colonial narrative so deeply embedded in its natural master plan. Viewed collectively, this evolving discourse surrounding Singapore’s greening journey illustrates how nature can be, and historically has been, controlled to serve different agendas. This essay has demonstrated the complex and amorphous quality of ‘nature’, and its susceptibility to manipulation. How might we best define ‘nature’ today? And since the Singapore story is so closely intertwined with nature, how should we define Singapore’s national identity? By raising questions which link collective identity to the definition of ‘nature’, The Colony – Archive engages with discussions charting the future of the independent nation, reclaiming its agency through its natural landscape.
Constance Koh
Constance Koh (Cui Shan) is a second-year undergraduate in History of Art (Asia, Africa, Europe) at SOAS. Interested in contemporary Asian art and arts education, she is looking forward to working in the library and heritage sector in Singapore.
[1] Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’ (Jay Miskowiec tr, 1984) 5 Architecture/Movement/Continuité 6.
[2] Adeline Chia, ‘Online Artist Talk: The Seeds We Sow’ (2020) <http://www.mizuma.sg/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/MG-Conversations-The-Seeds-We-Sow-2020.pdf> accessed 5 December 2020.
[3] ibid.
[4] ‘[Image Copyright] The Colony – Archive’, email from Marvin Tang to Constance Koh (10 March 2021).
[5] Ee Ming Toh, ‘How Geopolitics and History Shaped Singapore’s Natural Landscape Over The Centuries’ A Magazine Singapore (2020) <https://read-a.com/heres-how-geopolitics-and-history-shaped-singapores-natural-landscape/> accessed 6 December 2020.
[6] ibid.
[7] Foucault (n 1) 6.
[8] ibid 3.
[9] Chia (n 2).
[10] William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans 1844) 19-20 <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33447/33447-pdf.pdf> accessed 7 December 2020.
[11] Chia (n 2).
[12] ibid.
[13] Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’ (Eric Prenowitz tr, 1995) 25(2) Diacritics 11.
[14] Chia (n 2).
[15] Lim Tin Seng, ‘Singapore Botanic Gardens’ (Singapore Infopedia, 27 August 2015) <https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_545_2005-01-24.html#:~:text=Although%20the%20Singapore%20Botanic%20Gardens,Hill)%2C%20where%20he%20resided> accessed 15 December 2020.
[16] Audrey Tan, David Fogarty, and Ernest Luis, ‘Desmond Lee on transforming Singapore into a City in Nature’ The Straits Times (Singapore, 22 Sep 2020) <https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/environment/green-pulse-podcast-desmond-lee-on-transforming-singapore-into-a-city-in> accessed 31 Jan 2021.
