Chonon Bensho, María José Murillo and Ximena Garrido-Lecca at Centre d’Art Neuchâtel
15.12.2024
We’re happy to announce the participation of Chonon Bensho, María José Murillo and Ximena Garrido-Lecca at the exhibition Naming Natures at the CAN Centre d’Art Neuchâtel.
Naming Natures is an art-science exhibition, opening on the 14th of December (5 pm) in the Natural History Museum of Neuchâtel (MHNN) and at the CAN Centre d’Art Neuchâtel. The exhibition aims to contribute to public awareness of the conflicting past of natural history museums, while opening a dialogue on the significance of integrating Indigenous perspectives to overcome potential biases in our current understanding of the environmental crisis. Naming Natures is a science communication project based on Tomás Bartoletti’s research on the history of Swiss entanglements in nineteenth-century Latin America.
The multi-site exhibition Naming Natures, co-curated by historian Tomás Bartoletti and artist-researcher Denise Bertschi in collaboration with the Natural History Museum in Neuchâtel (MHNN) and the Neuchâtel Centre d’Art (CAN), approaches the history of Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob von Tschudi and his zoological collections allocated in Neuchâtel. This ‘Helvetian Humboldt’ hunted more than six hundred specimens in Peru between 1838 and 1842, still preserved at MHNN. He also brought back archaeological artefacts and human remains, now housed in Swiss and European institutions. The art-science exhibition shows Tschudi’s collection for the first time in its entirety, together with hundreds of documents and objects found in several museums and libraries in Switzerland, Austria and Peru.
Naming Natures gives the public an insight into the origins of this natural history museum, while at the same time calling into question its colonial background. The multi-site exhibition, including the works of Latin American and Swiss artists, scientists and historians, critically tackles imperial narratives of the Western scientific tradition, questioning the established Nature/Culture distinction and proposing multiple ways of understanding nature. Contradicting the fascination for exotic animals, the specimens exhibited are not chosen for their spectacular nature but because of the density of the global material history that they embody. Through a scenography including both Tschudi’s natural history collection and contemporary artistic works, this transdisciplinary exhibition project is designed to open up a space for critical reflection on Switzerland’s role in the asymmetrical processes of ‘Global Science’ and for a reassessment of indigenous ecological knowledge to face current environmental challenges.
Naming Natures is generously funded by the Agora scheme program of the Swiss Science National Foundation and supported by the professorship for History of the Modern World in the Department of Human, Social and Political Sciences of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland.
Naming Natures is an art-science exhibition, opening on the 14th of December (5 pm) in the Natural History Museum of Neuchâtel (MHNN) and at the CAN Centre d’Art Neuchâtel. The exhibition aims to contribute to public awareness of the conflicting past of natural history museums, while opening a dialogue on the significance of integrating Indigenous perspectives to overcome potential biases in our current understanding of the environmental crisis. Naming Natures is a science communication project based on Tomás Bartoletti’s research on the history of Swiss entanglements in nineteenth-century Latin America.
The multi-site exhibition Naming Natures, co-curated by historian Tomás Bartoletti and artist-researcher Denise Bertschi in collaboration with the Natural History Museum in Neuchâtel (MHNN) and the Neuchâtel Centre d’Art (CAN), approaches the history of Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob von Tschudi and his zoological collections allocated in Neuchâtel. This ‘Helvetian Humboldt’ hunted more than six hundred specimens in Peru between 1838 and 1842, still preserved at MHNN. He also brought back archaeological artefacts and human remains, now housed in Swiss and European institutions. The art-science exhibition shows Tschudi’s collection for the first time in its entirety, together with hundreds of documents and objects found in several museums and libraries in Switzerland, Austria and Peru.
Naming Natures gives the public an insight into the origins of this natural history museum, while at the same time calling into question its colonial background. The multi-site exhibition, including the works of Latin American and Swiss artists, scientists and historians, critically tackles imperial narratives of the Western scientific tradition, questioning the established Nature/Culture distinction and proposing multiple ways of understanding nature. Contradicting the fascination for exotic animals, the specimens exhibited are not chosen for their spectacular nature but because of the density of the global material history that they embody. Through a scenography including both Tschudi’s natural history collection and contemporary artistic works, this transdisciplinary exhibition project is designed to open up a space for critical reflection on Switzerland’s role in the asymmetrical processes of ‘Global Science’ and for a reassessment of indigenous ecological knowledge to face current environmental challenges.
Naming Natures is generously funded by the Agora scheme program of the Swiss Science National Foundation and supported by the professorship for History of the Modern World in the Department of Human, Social and Political Sciences of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland.