2. New Cabinets of Curiosities

Abstract

Several recent artistic projects have revisited the cabinets of curiosities that were fashionable in Europe in the sixteenth century, predating the more systematized approach to collecting and displaying nature that was to characterize the Enlightenment. Cabinets of curiosities employed visual analogies and other effects to raise ontological questions about the natural world and the relationship between art and nature. Pablo La Padula (Argentina) and Cristian Villavicencio (Ecuador/Spain) interrogate the politics of such collections, developing a critique of the relationships that underpin them, between colonialism, capitalist accumulation, and the commodification of nature. Renaissance cabinets did, however, allow for more creative and diverse entanglings of nature and culture than were permitted in the more systematic collections of the eighteenth century that were to replace them. In his reassemblings of natural history collections, Villavicencio reflects on the link between microscopes (among other technologies of vision) and a commitment to a distanced, “objective” vision that became central to modern scientific techniques. Both La Padula and Villavicencio create opportunities for alternative encounters with the natural world that are embodied and subjective. Like Yuk Hui’s concept of “cosmotechnics,” these allow us to explore “the different relations between the human and technics inherited from different mythologies and cosmologies” and therefore to generate plural accounts of technological modernity.