Taxonomic Ambiguity — film

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two channel video · 4K · 25 min · color · quadraphonic sound
Spanish spoken, English subtitles · single channel version available.
UV lamp, cinchona bark, leaves & quinine suspended in resin slates.

Through speculative & historical fiction, the film re-enacts in an unstated present time, a clash between Illustrated science and the possibility of another science, that was not allowed to flourish. However obscure, the conflict is important because it outlines a haunting pattern of colonizing power in the history of Latin American science that spawns across disciplines and centuries.

Taxonomic Ambiguity looks at the grudge between two eighteenth century botanists, Sebastián José López Ruiz & José Celestino Mutis, over the title to the discovery of the cinchona tree in Nueva Granada (today Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panamá). The bark of this mysterious tree was once the only known cure for malaria and an extremely valuable commodity that shaped empires’ and nations’ fates and fortunes, enabled to scramble for Africa, and even was at the center of the world’s first pharma cartel in the early twentieth century.

Although the anti-malarial properties of the cinchona bark were well documented, the active chemical component, quinine, remained unknown. This elusive substance, that dodged scientists and botanists until the XIX century, when it was finally isolated, is here captured in transparent slates, its presence rendered visible under UV light as a greenish, ghastly glow.

The destabilization of historic episodes might be a tool to reclaim our tarnished epistemic dignity, while twisting the POV at the construction of our own identities, enables a repetition producing difference, and resist hegemonies in the western monopoly of history.

Rijks Open Studios 2022, installation view, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, 2022.
Photos: Sander van Wettum