 I'd like to just say hello and welcome to all of you and to the second keynote lecture as part of British art and natural forces. This multi-part program of research events focuses on the encounter between artistic and art historical practice and the forces of the natural world and it places such encounters in both contemporary and historical perspectives. It aims not only to respond to the exigencies of the current moment, but to foreground some of the most vital activities and these conversations taking place within the field of British art studies and during the year that is the 50th anniversary of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. The series includes more than 10 events and recordings of those events are all accumulating on the Paul Mellon Centre website. Now including Tuesday's panel titled Observations Meteorology. The final session will take place on Thursday the 3rd of December. So on to today's session and we're delighted to welcome our speaker. Our chair for today is my colleague, Shria Chatterjee. Shria is a contributing editor at British Art Studies and she's currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Programme in Berlin and the Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Experimental Design Media in Basel. Thank you Shria and I'll turn over to you. Yeah, thank you Anna for the kind introduction. And I'd like to welcome Anna Kesson, our speaker but before I get into it, I'll just be reading out some housekeeping. So all of you know what to do and so on. So you will be automatically muted when you join the webinar as you can see and can only communicate verbally if the host unmutes you. So the talk will be 45 minutes and we have scheduled plenty of time for discussions and we invite you to ask questions. So to do that, you have to use the Q&A box and write out your questions. You can also use the virtual hand raise button if you have a question or a comment to make by audio and the host will unmute you. You can make the chat box to make comments or to let us know if you're experiencing any technical difficulties. The session will be recorded but no photos should be taken. Any offensive behavior will not be tolerated and attendees can be removed from the webinar by the host. So that's housekeeping for now. And so let me introduce Anna Arabindan Kesson, who's an assistant professor of Black Diaspora Art with a joint appointment in the departments of African American Studies and Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. But in Sri Lanka, she completed undergraduate degrees in New Zealand and Australia and was a nurse before becoming an art historian. She completed her PhD in African American Studies and Art History at Yale University. Anna writes and teaches about African American, Caribbean and British art with an emphasis on histories of race, empire and transatlantic visual culture in the long 19th century. Her first book is called Black Bodies, White Gold, Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World and will be published by Duke University Press in the spring of 2021. And we're all very much looking forward to it. Anna's also joining us from Perth today. So thanks for accommodating time differences. And thank you to all of you for joining us on a day that's, it's a very kind of momentous day with elections going on and new lockdown for Britain. So thank you and I'll let Anna take the floor. Thank you so much to Sharia. Thanks Sharia for this lovely introduction. It's really lovely to see you. I was, I think when I started at Princeton, I was on Sharia's, on a committee for something that Sharia was working on, dissertation or perspective. So it's lovely to be able to be back in another context working with you. Thank you to everyone at the Paul Mellon Center for inviting me, Anna, Ella, Danny for inviting me and for making all of the logistics for this very smooth. I'm gonna just share my screen so we can get started. Before I begin my talk, I wanted to first acknowledge that, sorry, can you see my screen? It's working, okay. Just saying that it's sharing his pause. So I want to acknowledge that I'm sitting on the unceded lands of the Nga people. I wish to acknowledge and respect their continuing culture and the contribution they make to the life of this region. I would also like to offer my respect to elders past and present and acknowledge all First Nations people who are with us today. This isn't always will be a original land. And saying that I also want to echo Sharia's comments that this is not an easy day. I understand for many of you in the US and the UK and for me watching from birth. So thank you for taking the time to join us today and I look forward to the feedback that you'll give me. This is a talk that sort of bringing together to new projects and some new ideas for me. So I'm really excited to share it with you all. In her recent book, Imperial Intimacies, A Tale of Two Islands, Hazel v. Carby creates a stunning intertwining of archive memory and imagination. As much as this book is about what it means to be British, it also examines how things come into view from personal and public histories to the idea of empire itself. In a particularly powerful passage, Hazel describes speaking to her father about his life in Jamaica and her realization that she had been unquoting here, seeing through the eyes of the metropole. She explained how growing up in London had given her what she calls an imperial gaze that through the book brings her position as a colonial subject interview. This particular passage has remained with me for several weeks. It resonates with something that Jamaica Kincaid also writes about in her book, A Small Place, where she describes how growing up in the former colonies often means seeing by continually evoking a set of references and frameworks to an elsewhere, a colonial center by which to view that which is in front of you. I grew up in Sri Lanka, Australia and New Zealand. I now live in the United States. All are former British colonies, each with very different histories of colonial rule and with very different post-colonial legacies. One thing that does connect them is the visual material legacy of this rule from public sculptures of commemoration to the referentiality of colonial naming. Like Hazel, after years of studying colonial visual culture, I too have been reflecting on the ways my own visual frames of reference are mediated by certain forms of colonial landscaping. Perhaps the most recognizable imperial lens is the genre of the picturesque. As a visual language, the picturesque might be thought of as a kind of common colonial lens. It's an immensely adaptable and mobile pictorial form that became and it became a malleable technique for organizing and translating site into knowledge across the British Empire. It was not necessarily a uniform genre, as we might see in these different vistas created by George Robertson of his patron, William Beckford's Estates in Jamaica. A William Bearman's view of Lucky Valley, the Estates in Clarendon and the ex-convict artist Joseph Lyset's view of Warnall, Sydney Harbour. However, by constantly reinventing the local surrounds, the picturesque asserted a sense of Britishness through the foreign landscapes. It transformed in the mind's eye. Indeed, it is the picturesque that has most profoundly affected the way I see and even imagined space still. Easily adapted and capacious, as Jeffrey Albeck has pointed out, it helped unite the disparate regions of empire. Bringing the colonial world into view, the picturesque connected empire sated imperial desire while aestheticizing the movement of goods, people, and plants that actually sustained this colonial network. The picturesque work by creating correspondences and allowing for comparisons. It's why we might find England and Sri Lanka or India and Australia. And indeed, I'm speaking to you today from Australin, which is a town just south of Perth and Western Australia. That was envisioned as a place where India and Australia could be connected through trade. And I'm speaking to you from a state, Western Australia, which was promoted as a place where British colonial troops could find respite from the tropics of India. Under the cover of a global pandemic in which the associations between disease, geography, and race take us straight back to the 19th century, my family and I returned to my home in the Southwest of Australia, where I'm constantly reminded that while I make these land acknowledgments, I continue to see the space around me in ways that I've been trained to through colonial frames of reference. These histories of empire and visuality, then, are not easily detangled. In this year's, sorry, in February 2020's issue of the journal Art History, the theme was Decolonizing Art History, which was edited by professors Dorothy Price and Catherine Grant. In this issue, Tim Barringer wrote that the first stage in the working through of this entanglement has been to, and I'm quoting here, identify empire as a major force in the emergence of art in the modern world. A key point he makes here is that histories of art and empire are coterminous because ultimately what we must understand is that art history, at least the Eurocolonial art and the disciplines heritage is itself a product empire. The aftereffects of these colonial networks linger in the commonwealth particularly through trade and diplomacy, but they also linger, as I said earlier, in the ways we imagine our relationship to others and envision the places in which we dwell, which brings me back, I think, to the work of Kincaid and Carby, both of whom in their books demonstrate the implications of these imperial gazes, the material, psychic, and often violent effects of looking. The legacies of colonial visual culture are not only felt in the former colonies, of course, and I think some of their recent Black Lives Matter movements and roads must fall, these movements that are having, bringing attention to how this plays out in Britain itself. But perhaps it is that in these colonial spaces where the imperial gaze has become more attenuated and the visual illusion of the empire made more apparent. Indeed, this is why art history has always seemed to me like an important site for provocation, reflexivity, and even perhaps redress. It is a discipline uniquely placed to grapple with the complex and contested terrain of visual representation as a site of knowledge production. But now more than ever it seems crucial to consider not just what these colonial objects bring into view and how they do so, but what it even means to look with them. This talk, then, is a reflection on these questions by way of two new projects that I want to try and weave together. Both of them are focused on the visual aesthetics that have framed meanings and experiences of correspondence and connection in the British Empire. And broadly, in this talk, I want to engage with the relationship of landscape and colonial medicine, which are two frameworks of knowledge production that particularly relied on bringing people and places into view. More specifically, I'll be focusing on the relationship of the picturesque, the plantation, and medicine. So I look at the practice and production of medicine and medical knowledge in close relationship to the expansion of the plantation economy, particularly in the Caribbean, where indeed I think many writers are showing us, or historians are showing us that the plantation was a medical laboratory. Doctors traveled to the colonies to put their medical training into practice and to find new information that would influence medical practice in the metropole. Medical networks reinforced imperial connections through the circulation of reports and images, while the conventions of landscape representation also helped to disseminate this medical information. Using the picturesque, I hope to make a connection between the visual logic of the plantation and the observational aesthetics of medicine, ways of seeing that medicalized space embodies. Alongside this, I want to examine the relationship of plantation surveillance and medical care. And drawing on Sylvia Winter's motion of the plantation and the plot, I juxtapose these histories with the work of two contemporary Caribbean artists, Jocelyn Gardner. In my conclusion, I return to Australia to briefly consider how these observational aesthetics frame conceptions of the landscape and its people and end with the work of two Indigenous artists who also compel us to grapple with the contingencies and failures of vision itself. Just by way of further context, long before I was an art historian, as True pointed out, I was a nurse. And it was a job I loved, loathed, and was terrified of in equal parts. But it did give me a way of seeing the world and of noticing the world that ultimately led me to art history. Seeing matters very much in nursing. My days there were filled with various forms of observation. And in several of the wards in which I worked, being unobservant had life-threatening consequences. Of course, art history may not be a matter of life or death in the same way. However, I think movements like Black Lives Matter and Indigenous Lives Matter across the world remind us that seeing or not seeing as the case may be does have real life consequences for the visibility and consequentment of the value of lives. The picturesque is a paradoxical set of aesthetics. It's at once placeless, as Elizabeth Bowles points out, get grounded in mobility and comparison. In the Caribbean, the picturesque was a predominant mode for representing the plantation. And it often revolved around an ideal of the wild, untouched natural world, while also showcasing its potential for cultivation. Robertson's depictions of Beckford's estate represent this relationship. In this print, and George Robertson was, I was depicting the states, as I said earlier, of William Beckford, who was a plantation owner and also a writer who compiled a descriptive account of the island. Robertson's depictions of Beckford's estate represent this relationship. As we see how here the plantation is transformed into something like a rural retreat, the landscape of Jamaica is depicted to show its natural bounty, while the rustic labor is supplicant and pleasing to the eye, reinforced relationship of visual possession and consumption. In this other work by Robertson, which came from the same suite of prints, we see the industrial work of sugarcane plantation hinted at through the arrangement of the buildings, but the labor itself is alighted by very careful spatial organization so that we're noticing the lush environment, a kind of harmonious management of the landscape and the rustic figures. The picturesque in these ways imaginatively improved the landscape. And as such, it was a useful visual counterpoint to the actual landscaping that took place in the creation of the plantation, which relied on the clearances and dispossession of the land and its indigenous communities, as well as the transplantation and cultivation of people and crops. The picturesque idealized these agricultural interventions as aesthetic improvements to the land itself. Creating a vantage point that in both Robertson and William Berryman's drawing of, sorry, watercolour of, of Lucky Valley estate allows us to look out over the land. Here the picturesque, we can have to see how the picturesque begins with a distance point of view from which viewers could observe, order and interpret the elements of the landscape through aesthetic conventions. Amounting to a kind of descriptive analysis through this close observation of beauty of the land, observers were able to also overlook the labour and the labourers that sustain these plantation sites. This interpretive labour also maintained viewers at a distance from the people who, from the land, but also from the people who laboured upon it. This distancing creates what we talk about in that history as a kind of transcendent or aestheticising eye. And it's the distancing created through this interpretive labour that sustains this vantage point, this all-seeing sort of surveillance, position of surveillance. And I think this view is particularly highlighted in Berryman's watercolour, where we in the position of Oversea are encouraged to quite literally order the parts of the plantation into a picturesque whole from this viewpoint of control and surveillance. It is this transcendent or aestheticising eye that the compared literary scholar Emily Sr. also traces in the rise of late 18th and early 19th century medical topography, written by doctors who visited the Caribbean. The association between space and health has a long history in the West and can be traced back to the texts of Hippocrates. Arguably, it was the expansion of European colonialism and exploration that brought more awareness to the variations of disease and their geographies. This growing awareness led to new forms of cartography and topography which the globe could be mapped through the diseases endemic to particular regions. These geographies also drew on both a humeral climatic and myosematic theories and reflected a belief in atmospheric infection caused by dirt or stagnation or climate. And this is just an example of some of the texts that were in circulation depicting some of these or making some of these connections between space and disease. This causal relationship between climate and health was also particularly significant for understandings of the space of the Caribbean and was also connected to the fact that there was a large number of deaths of African enslaved people and Europeans from a range of illnesses when they first arrived in the Caribbean. Senior explains, and I'm quoting here, the notion of the Caribbean climate as tropical was conceptually structured by disease and by an understanding of the tropics as harboring distinct disease agents. So by the turn of the 19th century, medical topography also required highly detailed how a landscape looked could tell one much about its healthfulness. This alignment between visibility and health, as Senior suggests, characterizes the scientific understanding of the landscape in this period. In her reading of the descriptive accounts of medical officers and poets in the Caribbean including Colin Chisholm, George Harriet and William Beckford, she argues that their medicalized constructions of the Caribbean, which rely on close descriptions of the islands, also drew on the aesthetic vantage point of the picturesque. She reads in their observations a positioning that gives them a kind of aesthetic or transcendent eye. They write, she says, as if they float over the land, but presenting and presenting an overview that emphasizes the beauty of the Caribbean. From this position, they're able to maintain an empirical distance, a distance that gives them something like a colonial immunity from the unhealthy environment and these illnesses and diseases begin to appear as they move closer to the islands, to the land itself. Connecting parts of the environment to specific illnesses, these writers made what Senior calls an environmental diagnosis that in making disease visible in the landscape itself allowed them to ideologically, discursively contain it in the colonies and suggest improvements to the land. These improvements included the clearing and the management styles that we see on the plantation. I just want to highlight this interchange that Senior describes between the literary and visual aesthetics of the picturesque and this medicalized relationship to the land to try and show more clearly how these two different visual logics were intimately connected. The first one, based on observation and diagnosis, was closely tied to the visual logic of the plantation as it was shaped in the genre of the picturesque. Both relied on a particular kind of interpretive labor that maintained the objectivity of the colonial subject and did so to keep them from the conditions that might relocate the subject within the space they described. I think this tension that is gestured to by this emphasis on distance and this kind of sense of creating a space of immunity is also a response to the increasing political tumult over the slavery in the Caribbean in the early 19th century. The fact that the area was no longer this kind of idenic ideal but actually a site of great and virulent political debate. The plantation was then intimately connected to these emerging medical geographies in the Caribbean as well as to these observational aesthetics but it was also a space where these observational aesthetics could be practiced in other ways. Doctors, as I said earlier, traveled to the Caribbean and found the plantation to be an active site of learning and experimentation where they could observe the effects of these plantations. They also led several plantation owners and medical professionals to publish manuals on slave management. These manuals and the hospitals that plantation owners built and it's one included in Bearman's view and this is a plan of a hospital that was built by John Thap in the Good Hope estate in Jamaica. Sorry, I'm just getting my place again. These manuals and the hospitals that plantation owners built cannot be decoupled from the plantation's main focus which was profit. In other words, I think the observational aesthetics of medicine could both sustain but also reinforce the extractive logic of the plantation and in these ways too, I think the point is that medicine and or the development of colonial medicine and the plantation complex are intimately entwined. I think we see this more when we look at the relationships between doctors and enslaved people. The commodification of black life permeated all aspects of the plantation including the hospital where, as Rana Hogarth has shown, black people became, I'm quoting here, teachable material used for medical experimentation and training. Their bodies provided doctors with new learning opportunities and the care of patients became another aspect of the subjugation that sustained the plantation complex. Not far from Lucky Valley where William Berryman was based is in St. Thomas in the Vale we find a Scottish surgeon practising called John Thompson who practised in Jamaica from about 1814 until about 1820 and carried out various experiments and dissections on the enslaved plantation workers. As well as being interested in improving the biological nature of skin colour, Thompson published a treatise called a Treatise on the Diseases of Negroes in which he described various illnesses observed in enslaved communities. Their treatment, including those offered by enslaved practitioners and the most effective healthcare management of these populations. Thompson was particularly interested in testing the efficacy of inoculation against smallpox and a painful bacterial disease called yours. In 1819 he published these four small drawings in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgeon Journal a journal that was really important to sort of connecting physicians across the British Empire and it's still in circulation today. In these drawings he illustrated an experiment with inoculation in which he took the discharge from the ulcers of an enslaved child with yours and inserted it into several punctures he'd made in the healthy body of a three year old. He used these images to offer an account of the diseases pathology using the skin lesions, the eruptions as markers of its progress. The inoculation was unsuccessful and the child took nine months to recover from the illness. Now in Thompson's drawings and in the article that was published alongside it the tothos described and visualised as a specimen. We easily lose sight of the hole for the part. The drawings themselves focus our vision like a microscope and like a microscope attempt to go beyond the surface to reveal the inner unseen workings of the body. We are compelled however as attending observers to examine and potentially diagnose ourselves by reading the surface of the skin. Because yours was so remarkably similar to syphilis and was also very similar to another disease in South Asia called perangii doctors were very interested in its pathology and its relationship to climate and environment. Thompson's drawings really interest me because they form part of this circulating monopoly of images and reports that travel across empire that connected doctors, colonial officials and colonial subjects from Jamaica to Fiji and from the late 18th century into the early 20th century through the practices of observation and assessment and you find later descriptions of yours and perangii from the late 19th century drawing on these much earlier experiments. While these this massive print material would eventually become grouped under the field of tropical medicine I think it's interesting and useful to think too about how these reports provided colonial officials with another kind of transcendent view or vantage points in which to look out and compare the sites and the people of empire itself. When we're talking about experimentation on the plantation we might also think briefly of J. Marion Sims who an American doctor who experimented on black women and slave women on southern plantations in the United States testing new surgical procedures and implements that would continue to be used in gynecological practice. Ones has shown Sims experiments also sustained racialised medical stereotypes that exist today such as the idea that black women can stand more pain than white women and these are stereotypes that you find in medical textbooks still. These kinds of histories in which black lives are sites for extraction and remain disposable are present. Just to mention this in this print you're seeing Sims experimenting on a white woman conducting a repair of a vesico vaginal fistula but this surgery where he actually began experimenting on black women the black women who he experimented on are quite literally drawn out and this is a painting that was made in the 1950s showing three of the women who Sims experimented upon most. This woman in 2016 the artist Simone lay created an installation called the waiting room at the new museum in New York where viewers could walk in and could access a range of wellness and alternative health care practices from yoga to apothecaries now lay created this installation to pay tribute to a 49 year old woman who died in June 2008 waiting to see a doctor waiting for 24 hours in the waiting room she fell out of her chair and died on the floor for at least 30 minutes as she laid dead in that room obedience lay says is one of the main threats to black women's health and for this piece she drew on forms of knowledge from natural therapies to expand the concept of health care given this history of experimentation and I think lay's work really asks us to consider what the care in health care can actually mean given medicines intimate connection with these historical forms of violence indeed as a former nurse I've been continually struck by the work which returns us to the problem of visibility that underpins medicine itself I've just described a distance and objectivity of observation and assessment are also premised on a certain kind of unlooking of a refusal to see I think lay's work can help us direct or help direct us to other strategies of care and other forms of knowledge that also existed on the plantation a movement that reminds me of Sylvia winter's distinction between the plantation and the plot the plantation is a site but it also suggests an orientation and relationship to the land that relies on accumulation and extraction in which excuse me in which people and plants are exploited as resources these viewing positions I have described reinscribe this logic conversely these viewing positions remind us or help us to see how the observational aesthetics of medical care can be connected to the logic of the plantation in contrast to the plantation but not necessarily existing outside of it winter brings up this concept of the plot the plot was a parcel of land given to enslaved people on which they could grow their own food and feed themselves thereby after minimizing a planters cost so the plot emerges from the extractive logic of the plantation but it still somehow exists beyond it it's a space where transplanted slaves could nurture and cultivate cosmologies through subsistence and the plot suggests forms of relation and a point of view that differs from the relations of the plantation that anchored and the plot anchors alternative forms of stewardship stewardship, sustenance and use value looking at the plot is to take account I think of the assemblage of experiences that may have shaped the lives of the enslaved but it is also a way to move beyond narratives of the plantation as a site of enclosed trauma Eve Tuck has suggested that we think through these colonial histories through a framework of desire rather than damage which is not to deny the trauma of these histories but it is to move beyond the dualisms of reproduction and resistance to take into account the complex personhood the assemblage of ideologies and experiences that shape the lives of historical actors the plot as I'm thinking of it is not meant to be some kind of liberatory site it is not necessarily a resistant one it may not even have been a reality for some enslaved communities however we might think of it in terms of a shift in perspective as a space not always visible to the overseeing eye as a we might think of it from the perspective of the soil as a site of subsistence where plants and knowledge could grow could be used and shared perhaps that might have been the ground on which enslaved healers learnt the healing cures of the local flora perhaps they grew their own and taught each other and indeed as Thompson and others and other doctors struggled to make sense of the illnesses they observed they very often mention although they don't necessarily draw on or use this knowledge they very often mention that enslaved healers had their own methods of treatment that they had to learn amongst each other this idea of the plot is central to this set of lithographs created by Caribbean artist Jocelyn Gardner called Creole Portraits Bringing Down the Flowers she engages in this series she engages one aspect of these of these histories which centres on a brief revelation in Maria Cibilla Marion's illustrated Natural History publication Metamorphosis in Sectorum which was set in Suriname where next to this hand coloured engraving of the peacock flower Marion notes that enslaved women that she'd met in Suriname had told her they were using this flowering plant seed to secretly abort their children as an act of resistance against their exploitation as reproductive labourers so in Gardner's hand coloured lithographic portraits you can draw on these histories by entwining intricately braided africentric hairstyles within the horrific iron slave colours that some of these women would have been forced to wear after inducing abortion and each of the portraits displays one of 13 exotic botanical specimens that were identified in the 18th century she's hand painted each of the lithographs so replicating the process of engraving from the 18th century and she's used an important naming system which really parodies the imperial taxonomic system where he or she combines the Linnaean binomial system of nomenclature with each enslaved woman's plantation name we can see a similar kind of plot history animating the work of another Caribbean artist who's based in Barbados, Annaly Davis Davis is interested in examining the post plantation landscape and often centres her work on the land she lives which is a dairy farm that used to be a sugarcane plantation her interest in the residue of the plantation takes different forms as if the entanglement of our lives did not matter she created a suite of eight drawings drawing on family histories as well as official records that traces the intimate relations between men and women of different races and from different socio-economic backgrounds using the idea of contamination which was often associated with mixed race children she accompanies these family portraits with drawings on ledger paper to really ground them in this plantation history the drawings combine as you can see here in sugarcane parasites, wild botanicals and plant roots but she chooses very specific plants to also emphasise their healing properties so this is blue vivain and the leaves of the vivain can be rubbed directly onto skin to treat fungal infections can be used to heal wounds can be used for that heart in the second drawing called pawpaw she's emphasising the antioxidant properties in Wonder of the World she's drawing out its properties which were very effective in countering the effects of these parasites these worms that lived in and around the sugarcane plant and in this this is bread and cheese it was used to weed baskets this works brings together that entangled nature in an earlier series called wild plant series she used the ledger paper which she found on the farm to draw images of wild plants these plants were plants they were not as noxious but she began to realise their value in offering biodiversity to the land but also their historic use by enslaved communities as bush teas and bars and medicine by drawing them and pressing them onto this ledger paper complicates that singular economic story of the plantation and it offers alternative ways of reading the plantation while also countering the daily logging of economic activity which we associate with the ledger paper in this work which is called bush tea plot Davis really confronts the monocrop of sugarcane on the island while also acknowledging the restorative resilient and regenerative properties of the land as you can see it comprises a glass planter which shows the soil profile and also allows the viewer to really appreciate the kind of nurturing environment in which she is growing a selective number of medicinal plants with healing properties for her too this work creates the visibility of what she says are near extinct covert aphor spiritual bush tea customs drinking bush tea she says was a ritual practice by the enslaved he was brewed from locally growing wild plants harvested in small plots, hedgerows and gullies and consumed for medicinal spiritual and healing properties in her words this work allows uncultivated botanical growth to offer counterpoints to plantations and exclusivity allowing reconciliation with the land and the virtual slaughterhouse both Gardner and Davis effectively move us to and below the ground returning us to the soil to the earth as a site and repository of meaning directing our attention to these other practices of healing, surviving and refusal they also direct our attention to an entirely different arrangement of the landscape of unfamiliar botany of unruly plants, small plots interspecies connections of the interdependence between humans and their environment this is an arrangement and a relationship I think that can take us beyond the generic all-seeing eye of the picturesque observation and diagnosis in part I think because these artists work also requires us now to do more than look, working through the framework of desire that Eve Tuck describes these artists are responding to and envisaging the entanglements and complexities of what agency can even mean and in doing so their work raises an important question about our viewing position how do we look back and from what vantage points are we compelled to work from to reconstruct or imagine a past the observational aesthetics of the picturesque were also important in Australia where the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities who were literally cleared from the land made room for European pastoralists and settlements on which Aboriginal people were often forced to work as slaves for the number of people whose land I'm on these clearances involve killings, massacres and the deportation of their people to reservations in prisons further north where they were quite literally quarantined in Louisa Clifton's depiction of the area near my home she presents a viewpoint that mirrors that of Joseph's showing a land emptied of its original owners under control, settled and carefully managed these kinds of views of Australia with their fine prospect of gentle hills shady native particularly eucalyptus trees and the sea air throughout the 19th century also reinforced narratives about this land's healthfulness as a place for colonists especially from India to settle while Australia's climate and its natural flora were associated with a medical topography very different to that of the disease tropics for Aboriginal people of course colonial invasion also brought with it diseases and practices that decimated communities and the natural environment Lyset's depiction of this family as if they're about to move out of view takes place for example at a time when smallpox was one of the highest causes of death amongst Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities at a time of violent conflict too between British colonists and Aboriginal communities these figures who walk away from civilization suggest the belatedness and inferiority of First Nations Australians who could do little to threaten colonial expansion but here we might notice as well that the picturesque lens rather than erasing or overlooking these bodies presents them as a matter for observation these practices of looking then are also embedded in the formal tools of analysis and assessment that inform art history itself histories of visual culture and medicine are not just another way that people and places come into view they remind us that vision frames what it can even mean and by extension the social and political arrangements that underpin systems of governance and nationhood I wonder then how we can look in ways that acknowledge these failures of vision how we might bear witness not stand as eyewitnesses which is what the picturesque also encourages us to do but how we might bear witness in ways that Deborah Thomas asks destabilize the ocular centrisism that has facilitated imperialism Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders like many other indigenous communities across the world where the subjects of a range of observational practices including a subject for anatomists and genocists this history is taken up by word jury artist Brooke Andrew and his installation Vox beyond Tasmania the installation was conceived to exhibit Richard Berry who was the first Richard Berry's phrenology inspired diphtographic tracings of 52 Tasmanian crania from 1909 which is a book made up of 52 tracings of the skulls of Tasmanian Aboriginal people Berry was the first professor of anatomy at the University of Melbourne and he was a eugenicist and he has a large collection of his skulls which he used in his studies what it was found in the early 2000s and now make up part of the University of Melbourne's medical collection so in this multi-level vitrine Andrew exhibited the book Richard Berry's book along with other forms of anthropological material literature and artifacts above these he attached a skeleton which you can see here and drilled a hole in the glass next to the skull where he attached a large elaborately carved wooden megaphone around the installation you can see 52 portraits of unknown people from Africa, Argentina, sorry Argentina, I recall Syria, Sudan, Japan and Australia and these are based on 19th century postcards that the artist has collected over the years now as the megaphone loudly extends into the gallery space like a mouthpiece for the skull it seems to amplify the installation while also listening in on viewers' conversations this form of dialogic interaction is a perfect archival intervention that transforms these anthropological systems of knowledge by emphasizing what Deborah Thomas and Tina Cant also talk about emphasizing effective dimensions beyond that of visuality a monument to the genocide of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people Andrew creates an intimate space for viewers to listen in to recognize the legacies of these ways of seeing to recognize their own complicity in these processes and in this way to bear witness importantly I think in this work he's also asking us for a response he asks us to listen and opens a way for dialogue that moves beyond that narrative of damage to quote from Eve Tuck again but moves us to a narrative that is also an accounting for the loss and despair but also the hopes, the visions, the wisdoms of lived lives and communities so let me end then with this work by Plainscreen Scottish artist Ruth Kutand sorry Plainscreen Scottish and Canadian artist Ruth Kutand who puts these colonial histories under the microscope her work called trading series consists of 11 microscopic views of diseases brought by Europeans to indigenous communities in North America and one disease syphilis taken back to Europe the diseases as you can see here in small parks are rendered in beads and they dazzle with colour against a black background beauty is juxtaposed with devastation as they reorientate our view of colonial commerce as we see here diseases traded for beads they also centralised the labour of women beads were a valuable trade item that replaced the laborious practice of sewing with porcupine quills in their microscopic form the globular shapes that form into a specimen of smallpox visualise a colonial history of violence however the practice of beading also speaks to practices of social and aesthetic relationality that go beyond the transactional relationship evoked in the series title in the disjunction between beauty and violence these circular and oval structures appear like other worlds in formation recalibrating the microscopic viewer from observer to co-witness in this way Kutand creates space for modes of experience that might exceed the visual logic of these colonial histories in our current moment we must continually reconsider the implications of the visual but art history and particularly British art history might need to take seriously the failure of vision alone as a way of addressing its colonial histories and legacies we might learn however from these contingencies following the lead of artists who in destabilising these visual frameworks are also creating the grounds for redressing these histories and imagining new futures thank you