Borderless Histories

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, Maria Thereza Alves has been using botanical research as an integral component of her art practice, blending the methods of the natural sciences, documentary art, historical revision and social/political critique. Her work often charts the intertwined processes of the global migration of human beings and flora as natural and discursive histories simultaneously. This movement across disciplinary boundaries and traditional Western dichotomies of nature and culture raise questions that are now often associated with the theoretical movement new materialism. These include exploration of the agential character of non-human beings and things as well as efforts to discuss the material and social dimensions of phenomenon in network, rather than as discrete elements. This essay attempts to position Alves’s art in this theoretical context, while attending to the particularities of her investigation and its sense of political urgency.