Botannica Tirannica" exhibition by Giselle Beiguelman

Giselle Beiguelman's exhibition at the Jewish Museum

combines gardens and Artificial Intelligence to discuss prejudice and colonialism

In the show Botannica Tirannica, artist creates plants with AI, disrupts our conception of nature and cultivates a garden with species that reflect and challenge scientific racism 

Works from the series Flora mutandis created by Giselle Beiguelman with resources of Artificial Intelligence.

(credits: Giselle Beiguelman | Jewish Museum of São Paulo)

"Every weed is a rebellious being."

Giselle Beiguelman

From May 28 to September 18, the Jewish Museum of São Paulo presents its first major exhibition of 2022. In Botannica Tirannica, a new show specially conceived for the Museum, artist and researcher Giselle Beiguelman investigates the genealogy and aesthetics of prejudice embedded in popular and scientific names given to plants, such as Wandering Jew, Jew's Ear, Shameless Mary, Mullet's Butt, Breast of a Girl, Woman's Malice, Mullet's Catinga, Ciganinha, Wan's Tea, among many others. 

The same logic is observed in scientific names, among which words such as virginica, virginicum and virgianiana are common to designate white flowers; and Kaffir, a word that is highly offensive to black people and considered in sub-Saharan Africa an equivalent of the word "nigger" that was conventionally called N-word, because of the degree of social violence it carries. 

One of the icons of the exhibition is the popular plant Wandering Jew (Tradescantia zebrina), the title of a medieval narrative that was one of the bulwarks of Nazi propaganda and has the same name in several languages, such as German, French and English, being one of the many derogatory expressions used against the Jews.

Bringing together printed images, videos, watercolours and an audiovisual essay, the artist Giselle Beiguelman proposes an aesthetic and conceptual investigation into the colonialist imaginary present in the process of naming nature, whose species, such as the so-called "weed" plants, are given offensive, prejudiced and misogynistic names.

Together with her Garden of Resilience, which occupies the external and internal areas of the Museum and where species endowed with offensive and prejudiced names are cultivated, in the series Flora mutandis the artist creates with Artificial Intelligence hybrid beings, real and invented plants, in a post-natural garden. 

"Patriarchy is ingrained in scientific discourse. In the binary division of plants created by Lineu, there are the 'masculine' ones, which have the male reproductive organ androecium (from the Greek andros, man), and are superior to the 'feminine' ones, which have the gynecium (from the Greek gyne, woman)".Giselle analyzes.

For the artist, "classical botany anthropomorphises the plant world and makes plants a mirror of man". "The way the world is named is the way divisions, prejudices are created, and binary thinking is consolidated". Therefore, says the artist, "naming is a ritual of erasure".

The extensive research conducted during a year and a half allowed to gather names of hundreds of plants that Giselle Beiguelman organized in five groups: anti-Semitic, sexist, racist, and discriminatory towards indigenous and gypsies (a word contested for associating groups such as Roma and Sinti to cheating and theft). Many of these plants have traditionally been categorized as "weeds", always combated, never eradicated, a characteristic that ended up being adopted by the artist as a manifesto of resilience and resistance, proposing a counter-discourse. 

The artist points out that weeds, a colonialist invention to designate "parasitic" plants of no economic use, were a metaphor for eugenicist discourse, "a form of scientific racism that defends the idea that the world is a garden and that the so-called weeds must be eliminated so that humanity can flourish," she says.

Eugenics was a movement devised in the late 19th century by the British Francis Galton, inspired by his cousin Charles Darwin, who proposed the use of scientific practices dedicated to improving genetic characteristics of future generations from selected human beings, discarding the rest.

The use of Artificial Intelligence, at the same time tool and object of criticism, was made through generative neural networks (StyleGAN): "For that, we stimulated a short circuit in the AI parameters, in order to review the pattern systems of the western world, which classifies everything in categories, central in the taxonomic thought and in the assumptions of the methodologies of work with AIs. Thus, while analysing how aesthetic parameters are created from prejudices, we use reverse engineering to indicate paths to a next nature, without superior categories dominating inferior categories", states the artist.

Also produced with AI, five videos, one for each research group, compose the series Flora rebelis. A 15-minute audiovisual essay walks through the fundamentals and processes of the artist's research and creation work, from the birth of botany to the use of AI. 

Also part of the exhibition is the Garden of Resilience, a circular garden set up within the exhibition grounds and interventions in external areas. Finishing this exhibition of multiple media and languages, there are three luminaries with the phrases Every weed is a rebel being, Naming is a ritual of erasure and More chlorophyll, less chloroquine. 

The exhibition also includes works by the invited artist Ricardo Van Steen, who produced seven new watercolours, with a naturalistic and scientific aesthetic, in which he portrays imaginary gardens from each of the research groups.

For Felipe Arruda, executive director of the Jewish Museum of São Paulo, "the Botannica Tirannica exhibition is totally aligned with one of the Museum's vocations to map, bring to light and deconstruct prejudices, contributing to a more informed, conscious society that respects diversity".

The exhibition's curator, critic and researcher Ilana Feldman, states that "Giselle Beiguelman is an image creator dedicated to thinking about the nature of images themselves in contemporaneity, mobilizing in a critical, unexpected and inventive way the relationship between aesthetics and politics, art and technology". 

Giselle Beiguelman is an artist and professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo (FAUUSP). She researches art and activism in the networked city and the aesthetics of memory in contemporaneity. She is the author of Políticas da imagem: Vigilância e resistência na dadosfera (UBU Editora, 2021), Memória da amnésia: políticas do esquecimento (Edições SESC, 2019), among others. His artistic works are part of museum collections in Brazil and abroad, such as ZKM (Germany), Jewish Museum Berlin, MAC-USP and Pinacoteca de São Paulo. He has received several national and international awards, such as the ABCA 2016 Award, from the Brazilian Association of Art Critics and The Intelligent.Museum, with Bruno Moreschi and Bernardo Fontes, promoted by the ZKM and Deutsches Museum (2021).

The Jewish Museum of São Paulo (MUJ), a space that was inaugurated after twenty years of planning, is the result of a mobilisation by civil society. In addition to four exhibition floors, visitors also have access to a library with over a thousand books for consultation and a café serving Jewish food. The MUJ is sponsored by the Arymax Foundation, Antonietta and Leon Feffer, Sergio Zimerman, Banco Itaú, Banco Safra, Instituto Cultural Vale, Lilian and Luis Stuhlberger | Verde Asset Management, Hapvida, among other supporters essential to its realization.

Service

Botannica Tirannica, by Giselle Beiguelman
Jewish Museum of São Paulo (MUJ)

Curator: Ilana Feldman

Exhibition Period: May 28 to September 18
Venue: Rua Martinho Prado, 128 - São Paulo, SP

Opening hours: Tuesday - Sunday, from 10 am to 6 pm
Admission: R$ 20
Classification: Free 

Access for people with reduced mobility