About

How to make sense of a disappearing landscape(s)? The search for meaning, or the process of looking for such a meaning, can make worlds emerge and dissolve. This is the case of Cinchona officinalis—a tree that was once endemic to the forests of the Andes and went practically extinct there in the 1800s. It fueled the world’s first pharma cartel, based in the Netherlands, at the beginning of the 20th century. Despite its outsized importance throughout the centuries, its existence has always been clouded in obscurity. The seed for this proposal stems from a desire to fill some of the centuries-old voids in the narratives surrounding the Cinchona tree, and from there, begin to articulate a long chain of events that have historically enabled enormous dispossession but are difficult to understand as a coherent assemblage, as well as their current relevance. These opaque episodes—that have rendered traditional wisdoms as "ignorant delusions," but were nonetheless crucial for the development of the "cultured reflections" of science, medicine, and botany—have disappeared from the ‘official’ narratives of science in South American countries and the Global North alike. With this project, we will be looking specifically at the production of knowledge and ignorance around the Cinchona tree, through the networks that connected countries in South America to the Netherlands, and through the Kina Cartel in Amsterdam, to other colonial territories around the world.

We want to render visible the untold connections between the territories that were gaining their independence with the beginnings of agro-industrialism in the Netherlands: a process that was conveniently prototyped first in the colonies, then near-shored to the metropole. By examining two distinct landscapes—a disappearing forest in Colombia and the architectural remnants of its commerce in the Netherlands—we aspire to bring these histories to the surface and make their interconnections more tangible. We understand the design of these connections in an expanded (and expansive) sense. We will examine the design of assemblages that make possible the botanical and scientific discoveries and the development of pharmacological substances, but also as a (infra)structure that allows and obscures processes of dispossession: epistemic, social, economic, and biological. With the development of this project, we will explore the symbolic role of (vernacular? informal? invisible?) architecture and its very concrete role in colonial extractive practices, beyond its material embodiment.