Herbaria: essays for a material and postnaturalist memory of botany and film

Abstract

In his documentary film Herbaria (Argentina, 2022), Leandro Listorti traces an original and relational audiovisual itinerary between two forms of record and conservation not evidently related: botanical museums and the film´s archives. Thorough a transdisciplinary and transcontinental dialogue extended from the XIX century up to the present, Listorti crosses diverse stories, experiences and interviews carried out in some archives in Argentina (Museo de Ciencias Naturales Bernardino Rivadavia, Museo del Cine, Buenos Aires) and Germany (Botanischen Garten und Botanischen Museum, Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin), revealing the colonialist logics implied in its constitutions. Moreover, this documentary film compares the vegetal raw material with film through its process of preservation and construction of alternative cultural memories; undertakings which manifest the certainty of the current extinction of both material universes, in times of planetary catastrophes (Stengers, 2017). “More than 500 plant species have disappeared from Earth In recent history. Never will we know them. More than half of sound films made on film material have been lost and more than 90 % of silent films cinema too”: from this comparative diagnosis, the documentary film explores -in an insightful and creative way- the politics of preservation of natural and artistic heritage. For all that has been said, this presentation invites us to think critically about the role played by the modern classificatory enterprise and its criteria of knowledge and collecting, in the fields of science and art, from a materialist and postnaturalist perspective (Descola, 2005; Viveiros de Castro, 2010).