Tropicomania: the social life of plants

View of the exhibition "Tropicomania: The social life of plants". Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2012. Image: Grégory Copitet

Hendrick Danckerts, Édouard Bouët-Willaumez, Germaine Krull, André Lassoudière, Lois Weinberger, Amos Gitaï, Claire Pentecost, Dan Peterman, Dominique Juhé-Beaulaton, Mark Dion, Maria Thereza Alves, Otobong Nkanga, Yo-Yo Gonthier, Pablo Bronstein, Marie Preston

An exhi­bi­tion curated by Mélanie Bouteloup and Anna Colin, assisted by Flora Katz
Scientific cura­tors: Françoise Vergès and Serge Volper

Tropicomania: the social life of plants pro­poses to recount the tra­jec­tory of a few trop­ical plants such as the banana, the pineapple and the rubber tree, from their place of origin to our local gro­cery store. Using anthro­pol­o­gists Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff’s con­cepts of “so­cial life” or “cul­tural biog­raphy” of objects, the exhi­bi­tion sets out to map the socio-eco­nomic, cul­tural and polit­ical impli­ca­tions behind the cir­cu­la­tion of trop­ical plants since the end of the 16th cen­tury. If the cul­ti­va­tion and con­sump­tion of pro­duces from the trop­ical world have spread to the entire the planet, what are the impli­ca­tions of this expan­sion? Within the four com­monly accepted stages used to rep­re­sent the path of eco­nomic plants (i.e. domes­ti­ca­tion, exchanges, modes of pro­duc­tion and reg­u­la­tion), what are the dif­fer­ences and sin­gu­lar­i­ties expe­ri­enced by each of these? At what point does a plant enter a com­mer­cial cir­cuit or acquire a sym­bolic dimen­sion?

Starting from the archive of the Historical Library of the Cirad (Centre for International Cooperation in Agronomic Research for Development) located in the former Garden of colo­nial exper­i­men­ta­tion in the bois de Vincennes, the pro­ject Tropicomania aims to ques­tion the role played by the net­work of gar­dens of exper­i­men­ta­tion in glob­al­i­sa­tion. Bringing together art­works, sci­en­tific illus­tra­tions, archive doc­u­ments, lit­erary accounts and films pro­duced in a variety of con­texts, Tropicomania addresses the inter­re­la­tion between science, exoti­cism and com­merce, and the power rela­tions engen­dered by this very alliance.

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Colonial garden, 1910s. Expedition of plantation in “Wardian cases” intended for the gardens of experimentation of Bingerville (Ivory Coast), Sor (Senegal), Papetee (Tahiti). © Historical library of the Cira

Associated insti­tu­tions and part­ners: La Triennale ; Bibliothèque Historique du Centre de coopéra­tion inter­na­tionale en recherche agronomique pour le développe­ment (Cirad) ; Ecole du Breuil ; Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale et la Ville de Paris ; musée du quai Branly (salon Jacques Kerchache) ; Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle ; Université Paris Diderot.

Bétonsalon is one of the « Associate venues » of the Triennale, an event organ­ised on the ini­tia­tive of the min­istry of Culture and Communication/DGCA, the Centre national des arts plas­tiques and the Palais de Tokyo.