 Okay we have about 80 participants signed in now and I think we'll get started as people continue to join us. I would like to say good afternoon to you all and welcome to this Paul Mellon Centre webinar. I'm Anna Reid and I'm Head of Research at the PMC. And this is of course a virtual event during a second lockdown in the UK. And it's part of a fully virtual autumn programme of events by the Paul Mellon Centre and part of our research series of more than 10 events titled British Art and Natural Forces this autumn. This year in which artistic practice and the practice of our history have met with the unprecedented force of a global pandemic. This multi part programme of research events focuses on the encounter between artistic or historical practice and the forces of the natural world and places such encounters in both contemporary and historical perspectives. The series aims not only to respond to the exigencies of the current moment, but to foreground some of the most vital activities and conversations taking place in the field of British art studies. We've recorded each of the events as part of British Art and Natural Forces so far and you'll be able to find all of those on the PMC website and I'd really encourage you to catch up on those in time. And today's event, Decolonial Agencies, will be chaired by Hamad Nassar. Hamad is a London based curator, researcher and strategic advisor. He's currently Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and he is leading on the research project London Asia. Thanks Hamad and I will turn the paving over to you. Thank you Anna and thanks everyone for joining. Before we get before we dive right in and I know we're all experienced zoomers by now, but I will just very quickly run through a bit of housekeeping. As you join you'll notice that you've been automatically muted. And you will only be able to, you know, need to raise your hands if you have questions at the end, and then we can unmute you and have you and we will encourage you to actually ask questions in person. If you, if the muse strikes. Otherwise, do please enter your questions in the Q&A box. If you have any issues with the image or sound, please let us know in the chat box. We are recording the session and the sort of accepted behavior is that no photographs will be taken and shared on social media, etc. The last point is I'm sure will not be required but I'll make it anyway because it's on there is that we will not tolerate any behavior that can come across as offensive and any such behavioral result in attendees being removed from the webinar. I'm sure that's not going to happen, because we're all really excited about really rich array of papers that we have waiting for us. The program is going to run like this we will, we'll break it up into two sort of sessions of two papers each. Each speaker will have 20 minutes, and then we'll break for 10 minutes of question, question answers to those two pairs of papers. And then at the end, we'll have the entire panel with us and we'll take questions for for the panel overall. And with that, I will want to sort of die straight in so that we can maximize the time for discussions which I'm really looking forward to. I'm going to start by introducing Holly Schaefer, our first speaker. Holly is the assistant professor of the history of art and architecture at Brown University. She has a major focus on South Asian and British art and empire, specifically in West India. She has published widely and been supported by numerous fellowships, including those offered by the Paul Mellon Center and the Yale Center for British art. Holly is going to speak to us about birds and books in flight across India and Britain. Holly, over to you. I'm sorry, pardon me. Has my screen shared? Not yet, Holly. Okay. Sorry about that. Okay, there we go. Is that, is that on? Yes. Yeah. Okay, great. Okay. So thank you so much. And to Anna, Ella and Danny and to my fellow presenters. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. So I'd like to open up my talk today and to be honest, it's more of a meditation so I hope everyone bears with me on that by thinking about the panel concept. Decolonial agencies. It's a method to decolonize history, especially histories that depend on colonial actors and archives through the agency of colonize peoples, the agency of climate or other natural forces, animals or birds, which was be the main subject of my talk today, as well as objects and images, among others. I depend on colonial archives in my research, as I'm sure many in the audience do. So I'd like to use my time today to think about how far decolonial agencies might take us and where the method is still limited. I'm curious on an 18th century colonial figure, the British East India Company official James Forbes, and his interest in and documentation of birds in the 13 albums that he compiled from letters drawings and paintings that he drew and collected on his journey to and from India, and his primary residence there from 1765 to 1784. To mention those been less time with the four volumes that he published from this trove in 1813, and the reduced to two volumes that issued in 1834. I'm first going to introduce Forbes and the nested materials within his albums and publications to show how one moves from the published books to the collected materials and the albums, different sorts of decolonial agencies can emerge. Let's discuss how agent of these actually are in the Q&A. Today, I'll look at three, moving from the large scale to the small. I'll start by thinking about how Forbes's albums are a source for identifying the global movement of objects peoples and birds across Asia Europe and the Americas. I'll propose that things can become agents to disrupt the narrative of the archive as well. Then I'll home in on Forbes and his materials to understand how he documented birds by way of cultural forms, like poetry and natural history illustration, in order to decolonize the archive by reckoning with its logic. I'll include with a rare intimate instance where Forbes recognized a single birds agency through the cranes instinct and memory in his terms. Though I will end on this departure from a human perspective. I want to stress that the archive overwhelmingly presents humans at the center of the story. He plucked the instances of Forbes's engagement with non British arts and objects in his published albums to discuss. He only included these in the published volumes on a limited basis. This is why I thought I pause. Forbes's drawings at the outset, though I will be searching for the agencies or flights as I'm calling them of birds and books. This investigation is grounded, even imprisoned by the perspective of the source. The denying of a Cape Canary bird is a warning to me, a call for humility in the process of decolonizing an artisan in South Africa manufactured this cage from an ostrich egg to hold the small song star within the egg of a much larger bird. See, this not only clearly shows that many of the birds that Forbes documented were constrained, but also offers a metaphor for the artful human orchestrations that constrain our knowledge of natural forces. A bit of background on Forbes. Forbes was the son of a London merchant who claimed a Scottish nobles descent. After training in classics at Hadley, he gained company employment at the age of 16 as a writer in the Bombay presidency in 1765. Over the following decades he moved up the ranks, working as a trader, topographer, diplomat and revenue administrator in Western India. First he was stationed in Bombay, now known as Mumbai in 1772. He was appointed a member of council in Kerala, and in 1775 secretary to Colonel Thomas Keating. He left briefly due to illness but by 1777 had returned to a post as custom master in Gujarat in Baruch and then collector at Tabor. In these years and from these locations. He wrote letters kept a journal drew the regions flora and fauna people their costumes and landscape, and he collected prints drawings and paintings from the regions he visited. He also collected birds and paintings of birds from other countries and when we expand the map. We see that Forbes in fact documented birds from his trips to and from India by way of Brazil and South Africa, where he drew the cage bird, and in India where he lived, and also via materials imported from China and Indonesia. When he returned to England in 1765 he organized his letters drawings and collected images into 150 volumes and 5200 pages, just no small feet. He then condensed that material into 13 large format red leather bound albums which are now housed at the Yale Center for British Art. For these, he transcribed his letters cut and pasted his watercolors copied others drew new ones fresh and inserted images that he had collected. And just to give you a sense like a material feel for the albums. I thought I'd show a couple of close up so for instance he drew this patera bird on a mango tree. And you can see that the bird and the mango have been cut from an earlier drawing and pasted here I hope you can see that in the detail on the right. Here in another drawing there's a piper on a black pepper vine and I think he chose these two for the alliteration between the two names. And it shows how he has elaborated on the pasted in drawings. But in this case, he didn't finish the addition so you can see he's left a couple of those black pepper balls and the vine the swirling vine of the leaf. In another example he not only drew a tailor bird but also used its feathers. Curiously in this case not to adorn the wings but rather to create the flowers that surrounded. So that's just a brief material delve into the archive. So in 1800 Forbes gave these albums to his 12 year old daughter Elizabeth. So in this first iteration the albums formal, they're really an intimate family document. But by 1813 he had condensed the material into four volumes of engraved illustrations, based on some of those drawings and works in the albums, and he published them as oriental memoirs. And again 20 years later these are reduced to two volumes. However, the publications though framed as memoirs highlight the political and mercantile program of the East India Company, whereas the unpublished albums are more quotidian, anecdotal and extensive, and flush with far more memories. In fact, in the published books. Forbes occluded the flight patterns of his sources, the birds printed painted and taxidermied that he gathered in the pages of the albums to stress his experiences as a company official. That being said, the albums contain information that offers insight into the large scale movement of objects peoples and birds across Asia Europe and the Americas, as well as specifically in India. And I'd like to start by looking at two paintings and Forbes's description of a luri bird. In 1772, in Cochin in South India, he wrote that he painted one luri to scale in bright pink yellow green and blue watercolor. And here the bird appears perched on a sprig of Malabar mint, like the line of romantic poetry written in calligraphy beneath for the the luri spreads its emerald wings. He pasted another luri bird by a Chinese artist in ruby red and turquoise on thin paper on the next page. Forbes seems to have aligned these two to not only compare the species, but also their method of depiction. Forbes looked closely at Chinese paintings and modeled some of his after their own design. You can see here that he's drawn a branch of kumquats on the left, which he called dwarf oranges, and noted that they were introduced by India into India by the Chinese. And likely because of this connection. He drew the fruits and branches again this is the painting on the left in a Chinese manner, similar to a Chinese painting that he pasted also in his albums which is seen on the right. Notice of the Chinese paintings were likely based in Canton, but the paintings would have traveled to India via Chinese communities and Dutch trade in Southeast Asia. This trade however was not only invested in the export of paintings. One of his letters offers yet another trajectory for the luri bird. The Dutch Forbes wrote have abundance of luri's cockatoos and other birds of that kind, which are brought from Java and the spice islands. I have drawn a few of the most beautiful. End quote. So these Forbes wrote were never brought alive to India, and the natives again this is sorry Forbes is language and the natives generally cut off the legs before they started with them. So, and as an example I've included a taxidermied luri on the lower left here. So, though Forbes perched his luri bird that he drew on local mint Forbes is loris actually traveled to India as birds from Indonesia, and as paintings from China via mercantile and colonial networks. An example of the luri bird displays a few trajectories that the birds took before they landed and Forbes's albums. However, they don't offer insight into the luri bird alive. However, Forbes's albums can be read for this kind of data. Again, not necessarily of the natural life of the luri bird, but of how birds intersected with company naturalists through hunting or shopping in the markets. In Bombay, for example, Forbes described, and this is his language, partridges peacocks and a great variety of wild ducks and other waterfowl and quote that were available for sale. He described birds obtained through the hunt as well. This tinga had in his language snowy plumage and a delicate shape, and was shot near the Queen's Palace in Kerala, and quote, and it does look quite stiff, I think. He also discussed the fishy taste of the flamingo, which his friend and fellow artist James Wales also commented on. And these are two, well, the left work is by Wales and the right by one of his draftsmen Robert Maybun. Wales also noted that he had shot a flamingo as well as a buster, which he noted were very fine to eat. Now the drawing on the right by the draftsman Robert Maybun, who worked for Wales, further admits the actual landscape that was in store for many of these birds, rather than the idyllic one of fruit trees flowering branches or marshes in the case of the flamingo and natural history illustrations. Here you can see that Maybun has laid the flamingo after it had been shot, it lays dead, its neck is bloody, and the head is propped on a rock. So though Forbes did sketch some of the birds in gardens that match those in his drawings, for many of the paintings belie the reality of the birds procurement. While Lurie birds in Forbes's albums point to the large scale movement of images and specimens, and other records offer insight into how he accessed birds, the Chinese export painting of a Lurie and the Dutch specimen from Indonesia, especially assert themselves as agents that shaped Forbes's output. However, framed his materials through a European tradition of natural history illustration and a range of historical personal and poetic narratives. I will now turn to Forbes's construction of his materials in the archive to reckon with its logic as a decolonial method. So to give a very brief background on natural history illustration in Europe and India. And this is very brief. So in the 17th century authors had developed a system to classify and delineate birds and seen in this example of birds on flowering branches and Francis Willoughby's and John Ray's ornithology from around from 1676. And that's one engraving from that is on the right. Forbes is on the left by 1758 Linnaeus had proposed a specific system of taxonomy. And this system was well established in India in the 18th century. Lady Mary Impey wife of the Chief Justice in Calcutta employed Mughal trained painters to produce hundreds of paintings of local birds, which were displayed to scale on a large blank sheet of paper inscribed in Latin, Devon Agri and Persian scripts as seen on the right. Likewise in Lucknow, Claude Martin commissioned Mughal trained artists as well to paint hundreds of local flora and fauna. These artists exquisite paintings were recently on view at the Wallace Collection and discussed in the catalog for gotten masters edited by William Del Ripple so I highly encourage everyone to go look at that to learn more about these artists and their project and the projects of the colonial officials. So Forbes's approach was less systematic and more experiential. In his words he sought to record the occurrences of the day before he retired to rest from the imperial elephant to the smallest insect with almost every bird fish fruit plant and flower that he met with in his travels and quote. The example that emblematizes his process of drawing together the scientific with the literary and personal is his discussion and drawing of the great Indian bat. The bat is not a bird, but because it's a winged mammal I thought I'd include it in this talk. He also drew this bat a Nespirtilio Magnus a foot and a half across the page, though it is only a portion of the bats actual wingspan which was more than six feet. He displays here the breadth of width of the furry body and the veined wings the Claude feet round in and at the bats five bony fingers extend from its winged arms, including the thumb to hook onto the branch of the tree. The bat to express its dual classification as both bird and beast, which he also discusses in that language in the accompanying letter he writes as the monkey seems to unify unite the brute with the human species in the great chain of creation. So the bats form the link between the birds and the beast. He called on ancient and modern naturalists to determine to which class they belong. Pliny and the ancients he wrote place them among the former, but the modern see more properly to fix them with quadrupeds. If Forbes leans towards a scientific assessment in part of his description, he turns to poetry for the fearsome and romantic. The sensitively drawn slide I per ears and upturned mouth, paralleled his judgment that these of their size are a kind of monster, extremely disagreeable both in their smell and appearance and quote. The bat leaves the realm of classification in this description to enter that of horror and found Forbes's evaluation. One fright well known in the West. To him, he wrote, most probably the heartbeat so often mentioned by Virgil and quote. So, alongside these evolutionary and literary associations Forbes also described his own experience viewing these bats, hanging from the knotted branches of a banyan tree on the banks of the Narmada River in Gujarat. And to expand on the drama of the scene he copied a poem beneath the watercolor. Well, I can read this from haunt of man from days of truce of glare the shroud is the in the most AIDS ruined tower or in the Indian figs romantic bower, where Brahman sage their mystic rights prepare where go sayings meet devoid of anxious care. In this poem, the description of the bats wingspan above in, in cases, the gloomy picture in the lines above and here, what I mean is that the language of the poem is actually mirrored by the actual bats drawing. So it draws the poem draws into mind the ruins of a mosque's tower and the sacred space of a temple, along with priests and yogis who invoke and add to the trees awesome forum. And this scene stayed in Forbes's imagination, which we see in the engraving on the right. So, for the first volume of Oriental memoirs. 1813 Forbes had the banyan branches engraved in deep velvety lines that seem to echo the span of the bats looping scalloped wings that would have folded tightly suspended in its depths. So here he draws together a natural history, drawing of a large Indian bat evolutionary descriptions by plenty narrative ones by Virgil and his own poem about Hindus and Muslims and a banging tree together to create a context the bower for the bat. So disaggregating the natural habitats of birds and winged mammals from the literary historical and artistic ones that Forbes gave to these animals is one way to reckon with the types of knowledge his albums and published works disseminated. So it should be quite clear that the examples I've discussed are human centered, even if they circulate around birds and bats. While Forbes's albums present multiple ways to identify the movement of birds in the 18th century, and can offer perspectives that decenter British art history, such as Forbes's attention to multiple artistic traditions of depicting birds or the mercantile networks that shunted birds across the globe. They are never the less from the perspective of an East India company official. However, there's one instance where Forbes recognized the agency of a bird or rather, it recognized him. So it is on this anecdote on the instinct and memory of birds and his terms that I will conclude in both his albums and his books. When Forbes discussed an instance where he captured a baby Sarah's crane during a hunting trip in Western India. However, rather than killing it, he decided to nurture it, feeding it rice and lentils until it grew to its full length, near six feet high. He left India. He asked a fellow company friend in India to care for it. And nine years later, in England, he saw a crane in an acquaintance's menagerie and was startled when it, in his language, showed signs of joy and impatience when hearing his voice. Forbes was stunned. Could this be the Sarah's crane that he had nurtured? Was the mutual sympathy he noted in his words one of recognition? The caretaker noted that this crane was the only one of its kind in England. Together, they traced the timeline of the bird's journey until they realized that it was indeed the crane that Forbes had cared for in Western India. Though still working from within the human-centered perspective, this crane momentarily breaks free as an independent being with its signs of joy and impatience, its instinct and memory. Yet, even if this crane walks free in its representation with head turned back in recognition in Forbes's rendition, it is similar to the songster caged in the ostrich head with which I began. The crane was constrained ever since it met Forbes, was passed on to his friend and made the journey to England where it continued to be kept, much like we as historians of art in the colonial archive are constrained by the materials at hand. Yet in this last small scale intimate example, we see a small opening for a single bird's consciousness, the agency of a specific Sarah's crane, even if bound by Forbes's interpretation to come through. Thank you. Thank you, Holly. Can everyone hear me? Well, thank you so much for that really rich paper, Holly, touching on migrations of birds of people of objects, forms and of knowledge and with many questions but we'll hold them for now, but please encourage everybody to put their questions in the Q&A box. And I will move swiftly on to the next paper. The next presenter is Bergeet Arans, who is a curator and researcher and presently is the British Academy Fellow at the University of Bristol. Bergeet curates and researches interdisciplinary processes with the current focus on environmental and visual art. And the title of her paper is Empire and Ecology, activations by contemporary artists of collections at the Natural History Museum in London. Welcome, Bergeet. Thank you very much. How much. Yeah, my screen. Yeah. You can all see that. Thank you very much for the invitation to contribute to today's seminar, the Colonial Agency as part of the All Men and Centres Natural Forces and British Art Program and thank you very much, Holly, for your paper just now. I think it follows on really very nicely. So today, discuss the Colonial Agency through three contemporary artists in the complex institutional ecology of a natural history museum. The focus of my talk today is the International Artist Research Residence Program, which ran from 2010 to 2011 at the Natural History Museum in London where I was curator of contemporary art at the time. And that's how decolonial thinking played out in this program, and also how it was compromised. Through the program, museum staff want to reconsider museum practices and scientific objects. Specifically, through this program, I wish to consider the archiving and storage of objects as transitional processes. Such focus puts collection care, or protocols and so called technical issues of museum practices, as museum historian, Kavita Singh would say, as potentially quietly compromised, as opposed to publicly compromised For example, the return of the Elgin Marbus or the Ben and Bronze, which you I'm sure you'll all have heard of. Singh draws our attention to how politics play out in collection care that were questioning what is preserved and how, how storage can be censorship, or what is put on display and how. The International Artist Research Residence Program provided a displaced space in the Natural History Museum's images of nature gallery to give visual form to the research that the artists had conducted. Thus, artists in dialogue with museum staff engaged in research and in the politics of representation. The program became an opportunity to ask, how can the violence of past collecting and collection practices in the natural sciences be acknowledged? How can these practices be reflected upon now? What constitutes change? Natural history museums, like other museums, are dynamic cultural formations shaped by society. Historically, and in the present time, artists and scientists are both part of cultures that seek to discover and to represent the natural world. Natural history museums thus have become complex archives of the representations of nature and their places in which to acknowledge and to reflect. In the words of one of the contemporary artists who spent time studying the history collections in the Natural History Museum in London. They reflect on the late 18th and 19th century formations of museums, saying, the main thing for me was the science aspect. It all relates to each other, adds together, history, the enlightenment, colonization. These very centuries, the 18th and 19th were characterized by European fantasies of knowledge made into power and by imperial authority over the non-western world over non-western objects. They were, however, under scrutiny from diverse cultural perspectives. What does decolonizing mean in a museum context? Studies of decolonization look at transfers of power, the diversity of languages, and the hybridization of cultures. Significantly, these processes link the history of Europe with the histories of other continents right up to the present time. The museum context decolonizing, as put forward by the Museum Confederation Lantanational, can mean resisting the reproduction of colonial taxonomies, while simultaneously vindicating radical multiplicity. So I'll show you the ones I got to discuss three case studies. Don't worry, this is the busiest slide I will show you and then I will go through each case study in turn. So by working specifically with international artists, and by interrogating the historic scientific illustration collections, museum staff, so I argue, developed a decolonizing approach to the museum's work. Artists were invited to take up residency in London as part of the program at the Natural History Museum, run in partnership with the artist studio organization Gasworks, also in London. The museum, together with Gasworks, hosted three artists. Shanghai-based artist Huyun in 2010, Indigenous Australian painter Daniel Boyd from Sydney in 2011, and Bangalore-based artist Sunochti in 2012. They each spent a three-month research period at the museum and developed works for an annual display in its then newly opened images of nature gallery. While the Natural History Museum offered a space for research to engage with the collections and with curatorial and library staff as well as with colleagues in interpretation, Gasworks, Studios provided an artist peer environment and crucially a studio space in which to reflect and to make. The museum's images of nature gallery from its inception offered the possibility to integrate the artist's commissions. The gallery, unlike most of the other exhibition spaces at the Natural History Museum, is aimed at an adult audience and describes historic and contemporary practices of natural science from observation to recording to communication. The artist's commissions became integrated into the displays, which in the first three years explored historic scientific illustrations from specific geopolitical areas. They started with the John Reeves collection from the early 19th century, Daniel Boyd with the drawings and watercolours from the so-called first fleet collection, made when the first British coloniser settled in Australia, and Sunochti from the Nearest Collections relating to Indian Natural History. Through the respective artist works, I explained the different artist strategies of decolonising the Natural History Museum. As stated in the discussion of the works, our extract from evaluation interviews conducted by independent evaluator Dr. Gabby Porter in 2012. So the question of how to change needs to be considered through the artist, museum staff and the visitors together. This is a comment by museum staff as part of the evaluation. This is a comment as artists and non-Europeans with a very different background and perspective on colonialism, on the European view of science, a very different take which generated discussion and raised questions, not raised before. Hu Yuen became interested in the study of East India Company tea inspector naturalist John Reeves and the Chinese draftsman Reeves commissioned to create scientific drawings. In 2000, botanical and zoological drawings he commissioned are scientifically important and were commissioned and collected by Reeves while he worked in China from 1812 to 1831. Chinese draftsmen, Akut, Akam, Ake and Asung were named and worked alongside others that remain anonymous. Under Reeves instructions and the drawings were used to name species new to European science. For the installation, memorialised memory and the drawing for tomatoes, which I show you in the next slide, which is now in the museum's collection, Hu Yuen's artist insisted to remain unnamed in the gallery space. And in the collection catalogue to draw attention to the draftsmen who have written out of history. Though Hu Yuen is still named as author in the museum's repository entry, the entry which states the quote, the drawing by the artists and residents was exhibited alongside the Reeves drawings in 2011 in the images of Nature Gallery and like the Reeves artists remained anonymous. In the museum staff member comments here, Hu Yuen was invisible artwork. You could really easily miss it. This was his intention, but others didn't get it. He didn't want his name to be mentioned. He played on the conventions. The museum staff understood the programme would be happening and expected something show-stopping, dazzling, big. Did his subtlety and sophistication mean that they valued the work less? It was delightful, playful and serious, disturbing preconceptions. The artist Sunoshti researched the museum's art collections from India and the Hortis Malabarikas, meaning Garden of Malabar, which in his first edition Sunoshti decided to put on display. You see that in the next slide as well. Published between 1678 and 1703, this record is a collaboration of more than 100 contributors from different professions and casts. The contributors included Brahmin physicians Ranga Bhat, Vinyaka Pandit, Apu Bhat together with the Malai physician Itiyar Hoden, a doctor from the Ishaava community. Sunoshti was very keen to include this particular doctor because he's not from a Brahmin caste in this reference to document 742 medicinal plants found in Malabar, which is now Kerala. Sunoshti's scroll drawing assembles plants from the Hortis and depicts them in wild disorder, a stark contrast to the catalogue plants of the museum's collection. In addition, the installation remains of the soil from the land where the sun never set, references the British Empire's extensive global reach during the 19th century and the environment of the natural history museum itself where, as Sunoshti says, everything exists in a state of suspended animation, nothing lives. Sunoshti's works reflects changing cultural fashions for the study and representation of plants and he created participation process to make the work, echoing the making of the Hortis Malabaricus. This is the Sunoshti and the installation on the on the in the display case. One visitor to the gallery comments, you have got some quite traditional work, and then something like that which is more of an installation and more modern. So you're really crossing all kinds of cultures. So it's meaning that in the adjacent display cases there were works from the collections from India. And the same type of Edwardian display cases and his felt was filled with his own work. I come to the third case study. First spent time researching the first fleet collection, which consists of 629 drawings and watercolors created from 1788 onwards the watercolors ink and pencil drawings include maps, landscape use floor and fauna portraits of individuals of the Eora nation, which were the indigenous population of then Vahana, which is now modern day Sydney. Boyd created two bodies of work for the Edwardian display case on the one side up in smoke tour. And on the other up in smoke tour this use skull boxes. In this part of the gallery installation entitled up in smoke tour boyd displayed a series of watercolors held within blackened archival boxes, like those used in the museum's anthropology collection now, but blackened by the artists to frame the iconography. His images are appropriations of historic images of Sydney Harbor plants, the human skull from Australia, the portrait of an individual of the Eora nation and sculptures from one or two. The images refer to boyd's personal history as an indigenous Australian, the colonization of Australia by the British as well as scientific explorations. His layered watercolors deliberately fractured the historic image in reference to the cultural genocide of the indigenous Australian peoples, the continent's first peoples. These works are, and I quote Boyd, like an erasure of memory or history and an image or an object, the loss of information empowers me, the viewers put in the position where they don't have that information. The second installation up in smoke tour this use skull boxes is assembled from decommissioned archival boxes which house human remains collections from different geographical locations at various times. The installation included field boxes, which were used to store photographic materials. The actual archival boxes, new and commissioned were sourced from the museum's anthropology collection archives, their contents, contacts and organizational systems are somewhat malleable idiosyncratic and changeable archives are a place for political imagination. The artist requested the museum. Once the installation had ended to archive the archive boxes themselves as documents and as witnesses to the history of the collection. But they never were archived. Further to his initial research boyd's interest in the museum's anthropology collection let him to investigate possible ancestral links to individuals in the human remains collection. The museum deals with remains currently in the museum's possession. His search led him to a skull, believed to be taken from a burial ground west of Brisbane, which might relate to his ancestry. All the artists scholarships had extraordinary attentiveness to evidence. The approaches were those of appropriation of materials collection care conventions and bureaucracies and science. They employed historical and archival research methods in order to draw attention to gaps in and ownership of knowledge. Furthermore, in studying specific material objects through the biographies, one of the artists boyd, just as mentioned addressed questions of ownership and that might lead to restitution. The artist works, and the process leading up to the show that for these artists, science is a set of cultural practices through which knowledge is constructed. Encompassing collecting practices and modes of representation within the historical and colonial or imperial context. This realization affected staff members and the public alike. The institution is felt throughout the images of the research, the installing the displays which are showed here are always framed by the institution and its processes. The images somewhat below the complex emotion and labor to negotiate the search for inspiration and dependence, the opportunities and support and making the works and the challenges to collection care practices. These were all long negotiations, some with compromises, some were disappointing, some were successful. By decolonizing I refer to revisiting and challenging the institutional taxonomies, scientific practices and colonial impositions while speaking out for cultural multiplicity and recognition. In the process here, the artist were the necessary external agents of change to challenge the museum. The artist works represent complex issues in a new deeply personal language, giving agency to objects and creating new relations. The institution opened up to give representation of space to artists as agents, reflecting on the history of the natural sciences. But this forward looking initiative was cut short, when the museum later decided that cultural practices had no place within a scientific research institution. Now, artists and scientists alike and create diverse forum for public critical exchanges. These are to address injustices embedded in the practice of science to find new forms of critique and dialogue and to co create new knowledge. Finally, as British artists joins on curators we should feel inspired to not simply address national, but European histories in the global context. Thank you very much and I look forward to discussing this further with you. That's terrific. Thank you very good. We never sharing how much actually. Yes, please, I think then we'll work to do it. Now we can see everyone hopefully. Holly and Burkitt. Well, thank you for those really rich papers. And while our audiences, which are now 99. Good round number. Gather their thoughts and enter things into the into the Q&A box. Maybe I can start with with a question to each of you I mean I thought it was really interesting how the question you posed for us Holly right at the start as you know in in the overall title of decolonial agency as to who has voice. And that, and the who you sort of expand to also to objects and to the crane, I think in that memorable anecdote that you ended on. And I see that sort of continuing with your reflections Burkitt on on this institutional attempt to use artistic voice to give certain amounts of visibility, and actually look at work that usually remains invisible, or is is sometimes just flashed in front of us momentarily through displays or temporary exhibitions, but quite often leaves no trace. And perhaps it's a question I think as much for both of you but from your different perspectives is to the forms of knowledge that that you in your experience and you're thinking about this, have the the possibilities for actually intervening in in the systems of knowledge in which they're circulating. So Holly you were looking at the publish, you know that that act of editing, and for big eat, you know that that mode of what's the display, and what then actually seeps into a narrative that an institution tells itself, or it's it's viewers. Holly do you want to start us off. Yeah, let me have to think for a second actually. I really like the, the way you frame that in terms of the act of digging the act of kind of making visible what can become invisible and tends to leave no traces and that's actually also why I love the artist and very good. I love the way he would talk, who wrote the something about the tomatoes. The, it was who you and, and how, how there was almost a reaction against the fact that he was so quiet in his intervention and I thought that that was really fascinating. I love something with Forbes you know Forbes. It's amazing because actually his archive is extremely resistant to this type of reading I was thinking about that as I was working on this. And had a last minute urge as one always does to completely change everything and and talk about memory, instead of talking about. That actually that instinct, late, late instinct actually fits in with what very was talking about this notion of memory. And how does one kind of find or push, you know, keep pushing against the resistance within an archive. And in this case one of the ways that I was doing that was seeing within the albums more potential for rereading than in the published books, even though the published books are also fascinating, but that kind of staging of material going back deeper deeper into kind of less polished or less formed work. I'll stop there. I mean it's such a good fit. Congratulations. It was convenient to have Holly and my paper together in a way because you know you can, what I wasn't able to show so much was to see the textures of some of the original works that Holly looked at in more detail I sort of skimmed over this a bit in order to in order to get to the contemporary artist you know who who done that work and so done the analytics so maybe I just backtrack a little bit so just to say that the natural history museum has got a vast collection of drawings about 500,000 drawings one of the biggest drawing collections in the UK, but it's very little known and I think this is because there's not such an interest in natural history Z and Holly mentioned the collection, the exhibition at the Wallace collection, but then the natural history museum has done those through the images of nature gallery has done those in this much smaller format, you know those kind of exhibitions as well but doesn't really get noted if you do it in a natural history museum. Whereas the Wallace collection is not natural history, it's an art is framed so differently. And I think, maybe that sort of goes to show that there's difficulty in reading some of that material and to understand what it can do for us. And, you know, what kind of networks it can highlight, you know what kind of process of colonization of violence it can refer to and so on so there's a lot of work that needs to go into this and to trust that this, you know, and to trust it's interesting worker. You know, when we were discussing some of these at the beginning with colleagues were you know it's very easy to make this look a bit sort of tea towel in a way you know it's just. There's a there's a lot of hard information in there. In terms of gender for so who does this these works, you know who's allowed to to study natural history, who did study I mean it's quite complex if you you know I showed so much their first fleet to the works from China to India. They're quite different social structures and underpinning the making of these works was just fascinating. There's a whole to some other barricades which you know contained a lot of violence in the making of it you know it's a lot of extracting of knowledge from those countries that were that were being colonized or an imperial context and so usually for economic gain. And, and some of these collaborative processes were not always pleasant they were very violent. And there's, there's an awful lot that goes into deciphering the these works and the making of these works and what they can do now for us. I'm also sorry in a way I made such a broad sweep just to go to human remains collection which is such a big topic. You know, I mean, I always feel embarrassed to mention it there because it is, it could fill the entire seminar just to even get started on this on this particular topic. So just to say that my main point is here that collection care practices in the sort of quiet ways, they are very political, and they are there they also tell stories, which are worth looking at and they're worth opening up. You know, contemporary artists like looking at archives and archival practices and I would add collection care practices, all of the bureaucracies that go around this, how you, how you name thing name and practices how things sit next to each other rather than archive, what comes into the archive. I just mentioned this briefly through these archival boxes which Daniel Boyd wants to preserve and I would say this is part of the history of keeping a collection. These boxes are so keep them. You know to pay attention to the material culture that also now in the contemporary world still determines how we look and how we treat and how we access that history. Right, we have questions now sort of coming thick and fast. Unfortunately, we're going to have to hold them to write to the end, when we will have some time when we come back with the whole panel, but in that in during that time I'd encourage both Holly and Brigitte to have a look at those questions. And as you could, I'm sure well imagine Brigitte, the questions of restitution of colonization, what museums can do what should they do. I have a feeling this is going to be like the big question when we come back after the next two papers. But thank you so much for for two really fantastic papers to get us going. And with that I wanted to invite our next speaker, who is Eleanor Newman Eleanor is a doctoral candidate in the McIntyre Department of Art at the University of Virginia. She has a particular focus on indigenous art from Australia, and with with with an interest in the legacy of empire and global contemporary art. Eleanor will speak to us about Maria Graham on the natural history of Brazil and Chile 1821 to 1824. Welcome Eleanor. Thank you so much. I will start to share my screen. All right. Thank you again Hamad and to Ella and Danielle and to all those involved in organizing this fantastic program I'm so pleased to be taking part in the conversation today. A massive 8.5 earthquake struck Chile on November 19, 1822. Though centered on the bustling port of Alpariso, but shockwaves were felt over a staggering distance of 1400 miles between Lima Peru to the north and Concepción Chile to the south. Maria Graham was admiring the play of lightning above the snow covered Andes from the veranda of Lord Thomas Cochrane's Acienda just north of the city when she quote felt a violent shock with a noise like the explosion of a mine. One of her companions Mr Bennett yelled for everyone to run away from the house quoting Lord Byron Graham compared quote the mad disquietude of the earthquake with that of the last judgment. The earthquake was a literal and metaphorical rupture, not only for the nascent country of Chile but also for the British artist and author Maria Graham. Chile had declared independence from Spain in 1818 and the earthquake precipitated internal conflict as tensions surface during their long fight for autonomy. After nine months in residence Graham was forced to leave and return to Brazil, which had just proclaimed independence from Portugal in 1822. In narrow she befriended Maria Leopoldina Empress consort of Brazil who shared her botanical interests. While Graham was well positioned to represent the natural and human forces shaping the world. I will show in my talk today how she made deliberate choices about what or what not to picture. The earthquake was a creative force for Graham, though it manifested differently than we might have expected. After mass she became increasingly involved in the production and circulation of botanical and geological knowledge in the form of texts, images, texts and specimens. Upon returning to London 1824 with the manuscripts for two illustrated travel logs journal of a voyage to Brazil and journal of a residence in Chile. She also published a report on the earthquake and transactions of the Royal of the Geological Society of London, the first authored by a woman. When she returned to Brazil she began producing annotated botanical illustrations that she would send along with dried specimens to William Jackson Hooker at the Royal Botanic Gardens. Her findings were later published and everything from Hooker's exotic flora to the compendium flora Braziliansis first edited by the German botanist Carl Friedrich von Martius. Individual contributions will be examined in my larger project on Graham. Today I want to explore we can learn from interrogating the aggregate as well as the particulate of her archive metaphorically speaking. Missing from the aggregate are visual images of the Chilean earthquake and its aftermath. Despite being a landscape artist Graham refrain from directly picturing the quakes devastating effects. The invisibility of the earthquake was encountered by her flurry of botanical visualizations. In addition we account for this absence in her archive or any archive for that matter. I suggest that this is not a simple question of absence versus presence but of Graham's agency. In the face of independence movements that were sweeping Latin America Graham capitalized upon the shifting terrain to explore the freedoms and constraints that she encountered as an artist author and naturalist. We are given the panel's theme that I'm not positioning Graham as a decolonial agent, but as a distinctive kind of colonial agent who was witness to and recorder of the commencement of the long arc of decolonization in Latin America. In this paper I argue that what could easily be overlooked as a mere absence can be understood as a deliberate elision by Graham when we consider her natural natural history practice as a whole. The choices she made in the aftermath of the earthquake are intimately connected to the distant geography she visited. We'll briefly travel from Valpariso Chile to the Canary Islands where Graham metaphorically encountered Alexander von Humboldt. Then to the flagray and fields outside of Naples where she engaged with the work of the antiquarian William Hamilton, and finally returned to London where controversy erupted when the geologist Charles Lyle cited her earthquake report and his principles of geology. The recent sublime experience earthquakes and romantic notions of geological phenomena have been the subject of studies by Noah Harringman, Paul White, and others who have examined the role of the sublime in relation to geological inquiry. My paper intersects with the one given by Stephanie O'Rourke on the geomorphic forces panel in unintended and what I hope will prove to be thought provoking ways and I can already tell there are many rich resonances with the papers today. The aesthetic frameworks underpin naturalist experiences of geological phenomena and their subsequent representations. Then Graham's careful and calculated representations of the earthquake need to be considered in relation to the gendering of the sublime as masculine. I conclude by suggesting that Graham strategically navigated the gendered terms of artistic literary and scientific practice in order to establish herself as a credible eyewitness, which was indispensable to her professional success on the London book market. Graham articulated her investment in empirical observation in response to Alexander von Humboldt whose writings reinvented Latin America for European readers. Graham in turn was the first woman to write illustrated travel accounts about the continent. While stopping in the Canary Islands prior to her first Atlantic crossing, Graham sought out the dragon tree made famous by Humboldt. She wrote that quote, he is a wonderful traveler and wonderfully gifted and qualified, but his eyes are too fine and philosophical for me. I saw many things at and in Oratava that he has thought beneath him. Humboldt skill as a naturalist was based on his ability to extrapolate from direct observation to general principles. Graham, however, privileged what she could observe with her own eyes, which she then composed into this detailed picturesque print depicting the ancient tree with only half of its branches left, framed by a trellis vine in the garden of the local proprietor. The deliberate choices she made in Brazil and Chile were increasingly mediated through this empirical mode of vision. In her Chilean travelogue, Graham vividly described the effects of the earthquake on the landscape. She reported seeing along Quintero Bay that quote, in some instances the earth has actually parted and fallen, leaving the stony base of the Hills Bear. On the beach, although it was high water, many rocks with beds of muscles remain dry and the fish are dead, which proves that the beach is raised about four feet at the Herodora. Above these recent shells, beds of older ones may be traced at various heights along the shore, as such are found near the summits of the loftiest hills in Chile. Nay, I have heard among the Andes themselves. Then she asks, were these also forced upwards from the sea by the same causes. Yet this picturesque print seen here is what faced her dramatic description in her travelogue. Though the juxtaposition would suggest a correspondence we see only a lush foreground opening to a serene bay. There is, however, one indication that something profound is transpired. 25 pages earlier a vignette depicting Cochrane's house was placed at the bottom of a page detailing Graham's lively discussion of earthquakes with a group of friends. To title the vignette, a corner view of the drawing room division of drawing room division of Lord Cochrane's house at Quintero, as it stood before the earthquake of the 19th of November, and then gave a longer appellation to the print that read Quintero Bay seen from the place where the house was. In other words, the house depicted in the vignette on the left was destroyed by the quake and thus not pictured in the landscape on the right. Through word image relationships the reader is provided with sufficient information to conjure images of a force strong enough to level a house. While we cannot be absolutely sure that Graham did not just lose drawings in the ensuing frenzy as she once did a board ship. It is evident that she deliberately chose not to illustrate the earthquake where it's aftermath in a travelogue intended for public consumption. In the original graphite drawing of the vignette seen here, Graham scrawled across the top that it needed to be made into a vignette and then circle the drawing where it was to be cropped. We know from earlier correspondence that she was the one who selected whichever drawings would be translated into print and there's ample visual evidence to suggest that she participated in that translation process. But all of this plus her descriptive title suggests is that instead of illustrating the earthquake Graham herself decided to picture it indirectly through the vignette and the view of Quintero Bay. After traveling back to London in 1824 her report an account of some effects of the late earthquakes of Chile was read aloud to the Geological Society of London by proxy and then printed later that year and transactions of the geological society. So the verbal descriptions of the earthquake from her travelogue and similarly lacked any illustrations. If there had been drawings Graham would have had the opportunity to circulate them to society members. From its launch in 1811 the journal was illustrated with a wide range of images operating on distinct aesthetic registers from the topographical geological sections to empirical studies of fossil seen here, and from colorful maps to picturesque illustrations. This rubric that Graham conceived her own visualizations of natural history. This 1835 print by Charlotte Murchison of a tidy village set against the jagged Swiss mountains illustrated an essay co-authored by her husband. That was published in transactions. While produced over a decade after Graham's report, Murchison's drawing evidences that it was possible for a woman to at least publish a picture as illustration in the society's journal. This quote drawn from paper and on stone by Charlotte Murchison this more autographic lithograph is analogous to Graham's essay, and that she directly intervened in the predominantly masculine discursive space of the of the society's journal. Other women such as the fossil collectors Ethel rel Bennett the Phil pot sisters and Marianne anning had variously displayed their drawings with specimens during oral presentations disseminated them and manuscripts are collaborated with their male counterparts to publish their findings. While these avenues would also have been available to Graham her decision not to illustrate her report suggests that she had other motivations for not picturing the sublime force of an earthquake. These motivations can be traced back to Graham's trip to Naples in 1818 with her first husband Captain Thomas Graham. In the surrounding Naples Graham participated in the careful observation of the landscape that Elan Schnapp has suggested arose from the unique combination of antiquities once buried beneath the surface and Pompeii and Herculaneum, with evidence of repeated volcanic eruptions and earthquakes stretching from Vesuvius to the filigree and fields. In her sketchbook she carefully drew a panoramic view of a smoldering Vesuvius, partially obstructed by modern buildings with its billowing smoke naturalized in the cloudy sky. Her sketch recalls the structures framing the docile volcano volcano and a print from William Hamilton's campy for gray from 1764 picture the long the bottom. The features throughout this volume were popular destinations for any grand tourist and Graham appears to have employed it as a sort of guidebook. While she did not depict the exact view from the original drawing by Pietro Fabris. She did sketch it from the exact same spot on the beach between Portachy and Naples. We see this repeatedly throughout Graham's archive she incorporated lessons learned from studying the views of her male counterparts to then produce novel compositions. In Graham's drawing there is no hint of the terrifying eruptions documented by Hamilton the British envoy to Naples. He exemplified the antiquarian for whom the study of ancient cultures corresponded to the study of Earth's past. The illustration that accompanied his first report to the Royal Society in 1779 conveys the awesome power of Vesuvius mid eruption, spewing lava, ash and gas into the air that was so luminous it cast the foreground in near silhouette. Originally drawn by Francesco Progeny a student of Fabris, the print along with the text were adapted for a wider audience and can be full gray feelings of our reverence terror and wonder are palpable in this sublime depiction. As Paul White has argued the masculine aesthetic of the sublime was important for rendering one of nature's most powerful phenomena and geological terms. The print speaks directly to the 1808 founding statement of another learned society, the Geological Society of London, which described geology as quote sublime as a quote sublime and difficult science performed only by philosophers or those who strove to unearth the quote, in grand arrangements of nature. The subtext was that geology was not performed by a woman like Graham who privileged the empirical mode of vision. She claimed in response to Humboldt's fine and philosophical view. Hamilton documented not only the volcanic eruptions of Vesuvius but also the 1783 Calabrian earthquake in a detailed report. As he was not able to hire an artist as he typically did he referred his readers to the illustrated publication by the Neapolitan Royal Academy of Sciences and Letters. The 68 plates after drawings by the architect Pompeo Chantarelli illustrated the earthquakes effects, such as the deep rifts and spidery fissure seen here. While framed by picturesque devices they successfully conveyed what the authors described as quote, the most frightening and awesome picture, which the angry hand of nature has accomplished and has displayed to man's uncomprehending view. The aesthetic of the sublime underpin the Italian naturalist mediation of the Calabrian earthquake just as it did John Martin's 1822 painting of Vesuvius erupting over Pompeii and Herculaneum as survivors flee the looming ash clouds and lava flows. In many ways Martin's landscape of this natural disaster epitomizes the masculine sublime seen in the work of many other landscapes of the day. His dramatic large scale painting extrapolated from empirical observation can be seen as the antithesis of Graham's careful and calculated picturing of the volcano and other geological subjects from Naples that she drew on small sheets of paper. While in Naples, Graham also depicted ruins featured in campy campy flagray, which underscores their status as geological subjects. She visited the grotto postelipo the temple of Apollo at awareness at Lake awareness. The temple of Venus in Bahia and the temple of Serapis in Potsolli, each visible on this map reproduced reproduced in Charles Lyles principles of geology. The grotto of postelipo was a tunnel that connected Naples to the town of Potsolli and the volcanic area known as the phlegrian fields, which included the ancient volcanic crater that filled with water to form Lake awareness. Brady seismic activity which raised or lowered the earth surface due to the movement of magma through underground chambers had submerged parts of both ancient Roman towns known the ancient Roman towns of Bahia and Potsolli seen here, which were underwater at various points. Graham coded all of these visualizations of latent geological phenomena in the language of antiquity. Serapis at Potsolli was of much geological interest due to a band of fossils left by mollusks on the three marble columns, which indicated that the structure was once below sea level. This observation led to an understanding that the surface of the earth could be moved not just by the violence of earthquakes. In Naples the antique and geological past was not just below ground, but an observable reality to once again reference Elan Shnaab. Graham recorded the Roman ruins and shifting landscapes of the phlegrian fields that were in plain sight. Her drawings located the geological activity she observed at a safe distance in the classical past rather than interpreted through the masculine discourse of the sublime in the present. Back in London Graham's report of the 1822 Chilean earthquake erupted in controversy nearly eight years after its initial publication and the transactions of the geological society. The geologist Charles Lyle cited her report and the first volume of principles of geology from 1830, which explicated a new theory that geological phenomena resulting from recurring natural causes rather than catastrophic preternatural one such as a biblical flood. And in his principles of geology, he pictured the same temple of Serapis seen here and also reproduced the images from the report by the naturalist in Naples. In the 1834 in 1834 the president of the geological society George Bellas grino, countered by citing a different report of the Chilean earthquake in his presidential address that was authored by a man. He then responded publicly to grino by publishing a pamphlet that included her own 1824 report, Reno's comments and her very searing reply. As Carl Thompson has argued Graham understood that grino attacked her credibility as an eyewitness on account of her of her gender. The debate was only resolved when Charles Darwin recorded effects similar to those documented by Graham after witnessing the effects of the 1835 earthquake and conceptual Chile. In several sublime moments from his five year voyage aboard the Beagle that he recalled had quote suspended his reason and imagination. Another transpired when Darwin first visited the Brazilian rainforest prompting him to remark that quote it would be difficult to imagine before seeing the view anything so magnificent. He goes on to say that quote if faithfully represented in a picture a feeling of distrust would be raised in the mind, as I think is the case in some of Martin's views. This is of course referring to the apocalyptic paintings of John Martin, such as that scene here. The third painting from his judgment series that depicts great waves of an earthquake overcoming an entire city and hurling its citizens into a fiery abyss. I'm suggesting that the possibility of arousing a feeling of distrust in the viewer underpins Graham's decision not to picture the earthquake. To demonstrate how much more affecting a real tragedy would be than an imaginary one. Edmund Burke invited readers of his philosophical inquiry from 1757 to imagine not a distance, a distant place, but London destroyed by an earthquake. If Martin's landscape surrounds suspicion, what would the critical response have been to drawings by a woman that depicted the effects of an earthquake on a far away city in the new world. To conclude, I'll return to Graham's Chilean travel log where she described her personal response to the earthquake in the pages between the vignette of Lord Cochrane's house and this view of Quintero Bay. She wrote in all other convulsions of nature we feel or fancy that some exertion may be made to avert or mitigate danger, but from an earthquake there is neither shelter nor escape. There is quietude that agitates every heart and looks out in every eye seems to me as awful as the last judgment can be. And I regret that my anxiety for my patient her cousin Glenny overcoming other feelings I had not my due portion of that sublime terror but I looked around and I saw it. I understand that she did not feel the same terror Graham distance herself from the aesthetic of the sublime. While she saw it all around her she deliberately chose not to represent a view of the earthquakes effects of sublime view of the earthquakes effects and her travel log or in her own geological report. As the controversy with Reno suggested women's eyes were not always trustworthy. And so, Graham was careful about what and how to picture the phenomena that she observed. She was found by invisible agents acting beneath the Earth's surface that was still actively debated by the early 19th century, mediated through the aesthetic of the sublime the earthquake was a subject that Graham determined not to picture directly. She had established trust with her readers as a successful author of numerous books and she needed to maintain her credibility as an eyewitness in order to sell her newest travel logs from Latin America. Although she was even more financially dependent upon their success on the London book market. While earthquakes were certainly not unpicturable for naturalists and landscapers in the early 19th century, they appear to have been for Mariah Graham. Thank you. Thank you Eleanor of another rich paper. Would you mind stop sharing the screen. And then we will sort of continue. I really enjoyed the sort of the questions you raised around ethics of bearing witness as to what becomes visible to whom and how and I think that this is a trend that it's very much in conversation with the two papers that were published before. And with that, I want to move on to our next paper by Julia Smith Julia is a lever whom early career research fellow at the University of Oxford. Postdoctoral fellowships at the Paul Mellon Center and getty. And has recently contributed an essay on ecology and art of the Anglophone Caribbean to oceans apart, the exhibition catalog for the forthcoming exhibition at Tate in 2021. With that, I'd like to invite you to zoom Julia. Thank you very much, and I can hope you can hear me okay. And I'm going to one please share my screen. And in the meantime, take the opportunity to join my fellow panelists in thanking him again and Anna and Ella and Danny for putting together such a wonderful event as part of a very ambitious research program. I'm very grateful to be here today. And as some of you may notice the title of my paper slightly changed. I thought it might be worth remarking on this because the change reflects my discomfort towards my own overuse of the term decolonization. And that's something we can perhaps come back to and also desire to not give the impression that I may be using this term, this term metaphorically, which is what I find most problematic. And it's something I'm trying to work through in my own research. So without further ado. Between the late fifties and early sixties, the Guyana born artist Aubrey Williams, then living in London, produced a suite of abstract oil paintings titled El Dorado. Today I will be focusing on this particular canvas dated to 1959 and currently kept at Castellani House in Georgetown Guyana. To my knowledge, this is the only El Dorado painting to be encrusted with strokes of gold pigment, which you can perhaps make out a chromatic addition that plays into an amplifies the mythic connotations of the series. Translating as the golden one, the legend of El Dorado is both a testament to the vital role that fabulation played in propelling forward the colonial colonialist project, and a syncretic origin myth that served different audiences at different points in time and which to this day permeates the national consciousness of post colonel Guyana and his neighbouring Latin American countries. While charting it every folk heuristic term would be a monumental task, it is possible to divide the life of the saga across two main iterations. First related to the Spanish conquistadores in the Americas, the earliest versions of the legend tell the story of a mythical chief believed to live in a remote location in either the Ecuadorian or Colombian rainforest, who engaged in a daily ritual that saw him covered in gold dust before diving into a lake. In 1599, the Dutch engraver and printed press entrepreneur Theodore de Bray popularized this version of the tale with an image that conflates then widely accessible narratives about the paradisiac qualities of the tropics with the mirage of a guild in which the mission so rich in mineral deposits as to treat gold like an expendable commodity. The print was reproduced inside America, the eighth volume of the Bray great voyages series where it accompanied Sir Walter Rayleigh's descriptions of his incursions into the so called New World. This account of his ultimately unfruitful quest to find El Dorado that bears by directly on my research. For by the time the English explorer caught wind of a prodigious gold deposit hiding in the depths of the Amazon rainforest. The supposed location of this magnificent treasure now identified with a town rather than a man had moved somewhere in the orbit of present day Guyana. A country whose denomination and territorial boundaries have been disputed since Europeans first occupied it in the 16th century. A Spanish and subsequently Dutch colony in 1838 this corner of the world fell definitively under British rule, effectively extending the Empire's West Indian territories into the Latin American subcontinent. From the year to 1596 Rayleigh's account of his expedition into the Guyanese interior has been retrospectively seen as marking the dawn of Britain's involvement in the region was also foreshadowing centuries of imperial turf wars at the expense of Guyana's native populations, whose descendants remain locally known as Amerindians. Unstrictable from these blood-soaked genealogies, the El Dorado myth has long been conceived as a parable for Europe's insatiable quest for material wealth, with recent commentators in the environmental humanities honing in on its extractivist logic. As this incorporates these interpretations, I also seek to complicate our understanding of the post-colonial reception of the legend by showing how in the mid 20th century, the recursive nature of the journey in search for El Dorado became a powerful narrative for articulating the displacements and dislocations bequeathed by the colonial order, which for individuals like Aubrey Williams were further compounded by the experience of living in diaspora. Crucially, we shall see how the perceptual landscapes of Amazonia, a real site as much as an imaginary construct mediated by countless fictions and publications, came to occupy a central place in the recovery of a pre-colonial heritage that could be strategically imagined as being culturally autonomous from the colonial legacy. In order to understand this, however, we must first turn to Guyana's throat struggle for national sovereignty. So the country formally gained independence from Britain in 1966. And the lead up to this event, as well as its aftermath, were characterized by vicious ethnic clashes whose tribal roots were and continue to be inseparable from the divide and conquer policies deployed by the colonial administration across the region. And more than any other West Indian territory of the British Empire, Guyana, or as colonial nomenclature would have it, British Guyana, was and is populated by an exceptionally diverse range of ethnicities. A stereotype but nonetheless suggestive impression of such idiosyncrasy might be found inside British Guyana, a land of six people. Illustrated with sketches by the artist and archaeologist Dennis Williams, who was not related to Aubrey Williams, but who knew him and who like him had moved from Georgetown to London after the Second World War. There follows convention in dividing the local population into six, six main groups comprising Afro-Gyanese, Indo-Gyanese, Chinese, Anglo-Saxon, Portuguese and Amerindian. These people did not descend directly from white settler communities, their ancestral lines were and remain disturbed by historic episodes of mass displacement, collective extermination, NATO alienation and compulsory resettlement. The decimation of the indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon basin and its adjacent coastlines to the subsequent repopulation of the Guyanese economy through the African slave trade. And later through the phenomenon of South Asian indenture, the country was built upon the logic of forced migration. The conflict with caesuras and terminal points, this traumatic genealogy not only led to a phenomenally syncretic population and a deeply cosmopolitan cultural heritage, but also secured a profoundly conflicted relationship with western notions of linear historical progress. And the book by William Williams, again, commented on the illusions behind Eurocentric conceptions of historical time in another sketch featuring a Guyanese boy and girl intent on learning about the origins of their country on a book whose pages are exclusively emblazoned with ceremonial portrayals of the incoming One is reminded here of a bitterly ironic scene in George Lumming's autobiographical novel in the Castle of My Skin from 1953, in which a barbarian history teacher follows colonial protocol by dismissing his pupil's suspicions about the past on the existence on the island of something called slavery and by urging them instead to concentrate on real historical events and characters like the Battle of Hastings and William the Conqueror. Dennis Williams' sketch similarly points to the crucial role played by the historical archive in ensuring the systematic erasure and psychological domination of the colonies. The search for alternative origin points beyond the chronology of colonial conquest was thus understood by this generation as central to the project of unlearning the lessons of empire and achieving independence. In Guiana, as in Barbados and across the rest of the Anglican Caribbean, the physical landscape was often imagined as holding the key to this process of cultural and mental decolonization. To put it in philosophical terms, the Cartesian split between human history and natural history, which is now being fundamentally troubled by the discourse of the Anthropocene, was never accepted in the transnational Caribbean, where myths and folkloric drawing on hybrid spiritual traditions always inscribed the ancestral past onto the natural world. Indeed, this came to be seen by artists and intellectuals active around the time of independence as holding the key to unlocking a collective consciousness buried deep beneath the surface of the Eurocentric archive. So artists like George Lamming, Kamal Brathwhite and Derek Walker, among others, looked to the ocean for a poetic of recovery and recollection across the archipelago, with Brathwhite famously stating that quote, the unity is submarine. These authors drew overwhelmingly on the tangled vegetation of the tropical rainforest, aligning themselves with a long tradition associating this relatively impenetrable habitat with the freedoms of maroonage and the survival of aphrodiasmic and indigenous forms of life on the outskirts of plantation capitalism. This particular position occupied by Guyana within the broad and Caribbean context undoubtedly accounts for such unique ego aesthetic imaginary. Although this Latin American country is culturally and linguistically aligned with the Anglophone islands of the Caribbean Archipelago, an island it is not. As described by Wilson Harris, quote, two oceans flank the narrow strip of coast land along which the greater body of the population live. One, what is subdued perennial raw with the Atlantic. The other green and tall and lit by the surf of electricity is the Amazon rainforest leading towards the borders with Brazil and Venezuela. Very known as the author of genre of ending fiction Harris originally trained as a land and hydrographic surveyor tasked with studying the morphology of Guyana's exceptionally by diverse interior, which comprises fixed tropical jungle and prodigious water forces, as much as vast savannahs and mountainous networks. The book, his first novel summons the testimony of this ancestral landscape in an attempt to reconstruct a national history marked by quote, broken conceptions as well as misconception of the residue and meaning of conquest. Just one year after Harris moved to London in 1959, the book draws inspiration from several to really his account of his search for El Dorado, but turns the meandering voyage of the English explorer into a complex allegory for the labyrinthine dimensions of Caribbean identity. In an admirer of Carl Young Harris, maintain the El Dorado represented the archetypal equation between place and placelessness, offering the perfect scene for rehearsing the shared origins of a divided people whose history was riddled with episodes of physical and cognitive displacement. Interestingly, given the anti-colonial spirit of the book, the character that leads Harris' fictional expedition is a despotic plantation owner by the name of Don. He travels with a motley crew whose ethnic syncretism reflects the migratory history of the region. In the course of their voyage upriver, they all die several deaths, reappearing as ghosts in a looped conception of time that should be understood as displacing colonial chronotopes. In the finale, they find each other inside the palace of the peacock that gives the novel its title. A heavenly edifice who simultaneously celestial and zoological qualities speak to the indigenous cosmologies that fueled Harris' imagination. Indeed, in a later essay titled The Music of Living Landscapes from 1996, the author explicitly acknowledged his debt to, quote, Amerindian legends which tell of sleeping yet on occasion singing rocks that witness to the traffic of history. This animistic conception of the world and of the archive was consciously understood as a rebuff against European ways of looking at the environment as something to be sized and landscaped rather than paid heed to, listen to. Compatible ideas inform the work of Aubrey Williams, who like Harris spent a significant period of time in the Guyanese hinterland where he served as an agricultural field officer before leaving for London in 1952 and pursuing a career as an artist. Painted around the same time as his compatriot was working on the manuscript for Palace of the Peacock, his Eldorado offers another counterhegemonic rebuff to Rayleigh's alleged discovery of Guiana. Significantly, Williams used color to evoke rather than to represent the landscapes that had molded his imagination. Hence, Eldorado's murky jade background is reminiscent of Guyanese riverbeds, while specks of gold paint scattered across the surface of the canvas referenced both the fantasy of a gilded civilization and the mineral deposits that starting in the late 19th century were really found in the Essequibo River and its affluence. The color red, conscious carnage anticipating Harris's later definition of Eldorado as both a fabulous tale and quote, a bloodstained canvas of greed for gold and territory across centuries. Coupled with the use of black and white, however, the same hue also celebrates the chromatic cultures of the Amazon basin, which Williams had come to know through his formative friendships with members of the Warao community. Equally, the graphic signs that dominate the canvas are inspired by Amerindian petroglyphs, ancient stone carvings typically found on large boulders along the winding water courses that street the Amazon canopy. These inscriptions fulfilled an ecological function long before the discipline of ecology existed, providing guidance to canoeing travelers about sustainable hunting quotas, as well as alerting them to dangers ahead. By repeatedly drawing on these coded messages, Williams not only contributed to the project of reconnecting with a heritage that was felt to be shrouded in mystery and loss, but also reconfigured the natural world and geological matter in particular as a sentient sphere with mnemonic faculties far outperforming human recollection. From a contemporary perspective informed by the indigenous critique of the new materialist turn in the humanities, his work from the late fifties and early sixties underscores how modes of existence that honor the interconnectedness of different entities and life forms have long subsisted on the racialized frontiers of colonial capitalism. Not only did the postcolonial rediscovery of the Guyanese interior prompt a surge of interest among urbanized artists and intellectuals for non anthropocentric and pre columbian cosmologies, but it also instigated an equally ideologically driven understanding with the limitations of the human eye, the organ most directly connected to the mind in the empiricist imaginary of the West. There is no space, no vista, Dennis Williams once explained, adding you cannot experience these fundamental props to human identity under the canopy. The sense of perspectival collapse, which we might take to describe or agree Williams abstract technique contrast them dramatically with the ocular centrism projected by imperial landscape paintings such as this portrayal of a Guyanese plantation by the English artist Joshua Bryant. This rigid Albertian structure and idyllic take on the relationship between the plantocracy and the indigenous American communities whose extermination laid the foundations for the sugarcane economy. Brian's canvas conforms to what Richard Grove once referred to as the imaginative hegemony of white settler colonialism. In stark contrast, Aubrey Williams pursued a phenomenological and eco poetic relationship with the land. Though the philosophical nuances of his pictorial compositions were largely lost on European audiences was initial interpretation of this material was over determined by North Atlantic debates over the merits of abstract vis-a-vis figurative art. Williams lifelong engagement with the language of petroglyphs is perhaps more usefully understood as a critique of what we may call colonial geo prospecting. Pace London, she being a seminal work on colonial bio prospecting. If asked she being there and others have shown the Colombian exchange set in motion a worldwide traffic in biological organisms, disturbing the planetary ecosystem in irreversible ways. The project of empire building also entailed the mining every corner of the earth, including Guyana for inert goods. Catherine Yusof recently referred to this process of as white geology, drawing attention to the imperial roots of this discipline. Significantly, Yusof elevates the Caribbean to a paradigm for what she calls the inhuman proximity between geology and blackness for here the European quest for precious riches was only truly fulfilled through the implementation of the slave economy, also known as black gold. The form of ratification in which the plantation workforce figuratively took on mineralogical qualities stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from from the animistic faculties that both Harris and Williams ascribed to rocks in their mutually sympathetic critique of racial capitalism. It's all the more compelling when one thinks that Williams produced his Eldorado series in Britain as a time when the country championed the works of painters like Graham Sutherland, whose geological imagination was routinely, if uneasily linked to patriotic narratives about the origins and future prospects of a country that still identified as an imperial powerhouse. Yet it is equally if not more important to recognize that colonies approaching independence in the mid 20th century were wrestling with their own sets of questions about origins and bring points. Painted as Guyana was being ravaged by ethnic strife and conceived as a gift to the artist compatriots and therefore given to Castellani house shortly after being made, Eldorado offers a visual counterpart to the collective journey of self discovery and self recovery to engage inside Palace of the Peacock and similarly locates the future, the possibility of future in the ethnic coalitions within the eco poetic traditions of the Amazon basin. Indeed fellow Guyanese painter Stanley griefs characterise Williams romantic attachment to Amerindian culture as motivated by a need to assert a form of cosmic unity in the face of widespread ethnic nationalism. The natural world I have shown in this paper was accorded a pivotal role in this political project, which until taking stock of the colonial legacy was also reorienting the collective imagination to what's differently conceived eco poetic futures. Thank you. Thank you so much Julia. That was yet another really rich and very sort of generative paper. As as people are sort of gathering questions. Firstly, for our two speakers in the second session, Julia and Eleanor, but also questions that you'd want to put to all the panelists and I'd encourage you to either raise your hands, or add to the question and answer box. But maybe I'll start with a pair of questions and again they're sort of connected because both of both you, Julia and Eleanor, sort of look in this idea of visibility itself as to what, what approaches and methods, your use in terms of bringing certain matters or histories, or even forms to the surface, and then how they are read or not read depending on the different audiences in turn. And I wonder, particularly when you started with this your discomfort with the term decolonization, whether that that term itself is now shaping our reading of of of what we are now looking at yet again in this generation. So if you could sort of start with the response to that and Eleanor if you would also just share with us your perspectives on the efficacy of Maria Graham's strategies for visibility. Okay, thank you. I think it's been it's important for me to think through this, the use of the term decolonization and the use of decolonial techniques in terms of shifting epistemologies and modes of seeing in the work of someone like Opie Williams and his contemporary in respect to the project decolonization as a political economic as a geopolitical project so at that time within that context of the 1670s there was a correspondence between these dimensions. In many ways, you know the conditions have changed in the present we're not looking at the same kind of landscape so one question for me is where does that radical political imagination fit with contemporary debates around decolonization and sometimes as this word enters academic spaces and museum spaces. I feel that that radical political element is lost in favor of a more metaphorical understanding which is sometimes at worst performative and not not always the case and in my teachings I have used the terms and I'm very sympathetic to the work of museums, and I think we've got some of the earlier speakers were were talking about in terms of what the intentions behind politicizing collections in a different directions are, but I think the political impetus behind that has to be really quite radical and the experience is that often museums don't actually want structural change but cosmetic operations where they bring in artists and that works very well and and often that's in spite of what the curators or staff intentions are so it's a very problematic time that I'm just very cautious of using outside of the context of the 1670s. I'm not sure if I've answered everything. I mean my sort of question was really in terms of even just looking at Aubrey Williams work. Oh yeah have the reception. Yeah, so I, that's, thank you so much for asking that because it gives me a chance of saying that I am by no means the only person working on this this been terrific work. I'm like Professor Cobana and master has obviously been working on this artist for a long time, and then a more emergent generation of scholars like Leon Wayne Wright or Ian Dudley more recently have published brilliant writing on Aubrey Williams so on the one hand, there is a tradition there's always been interest in this figure, perhaps now it's intensified and I think a big part of it that is the conversation on decolonizing British art history specifically. But here I do agree with someone like Leon Wayne Wright who insists that Aubrey Williams doesn't need to be seen as a British artist in order to be championed as a as a leading figure in the history of 20th century art and I think the guy needs context for his practice. It's very important and the fact that he gifted so much of his work back to Georgetown at a moment of a very conflicted political time for the history of Guyana is also very significant. And I think one thing that's maybe worth mentioning is that there is obviously a great interest in his work because of its ecological connotations which are incredibly prescient. And I know that he even tried to apply for fellowships in the 70s and 80s with ecological ideas that and he was turned down because obviously those ideas were not seen as that interesting at the time but they have become so enormously now. I gave a paper that was very focused on the ecological elements of his work in Georgetown in Guyana. Many of the contemporary artists there felt that I was also really missing the political nuances of his work particularly where ecology and this idea of cosmic unity or interdependency between different subjects related to the question of ethnic factionalism in Guyana and the legacy of colonialism as an incredibly divisive one. So there was a feeling that art historian producing in North Atlantic centers of excellence including myself and therefore the Paul Maddon Center were not necessarily grasping with sometimes this term ecology and the colonization sort of became could easily slip into becoming ways of obfuscating the political specificities of the artist's work. So that's something I'm very mindful of when I'm trying to work in the direction of bringing that out more. Yeah. Thank you. I'm sure that that's a, that's an area that we'll come back to. But before we open it up to all the panelists. Eleanor, would you want to share any reflections on this view of visibility and method. Yeah, certainly. In thinking about the representational strategies of a distinctive type of colonial agent a female colonial agent like grand were so fortunate and having this remarkable archive that she's produced of both image and text. And, and there's that there's so much within both of those representational strategies to unpack when she was in Latin America, Graham acted as the sort of reporter very self consciously recording histories that would otherwise have been lost she interviewed people she reprinted in the appendices of her books, political speeches. And there's a reason that these books are still treated today as as important historical documents both in Chile and in Brazil because she recorded so much of the important early histories of these independence movements. And while picturing itself is a colonial act. There is something to be said for her sort of empirical mode of vision which I think you can see playing out in both her writing as well as her picturing. And within the sort of complex representations there is is much to be to be mined. And I think it's, it's interesting to position the histories that Graham is helping to kind of self consciously create and represent and how those histories continue to play out as these decolonial movements move into the future and I was thinking and at least in terms of sort of resonances between our papers, these, these histories that have been created and pictured by agents like Graham, then become the stuff that artists are mining and unpacking. Now the some of the artists that Julia Julia has has mentioned as well so there's there's a range of strategies that Graham uses to make things visible and while there's a sort of colonial perspective that she's taking on this material I think there's also there's sort of rich information that's continued can continue to be mine for other purposes and intentions. I'll leave it there. Thank you. We have one specific question that's just come in from Hillary flow for Julia and Hillary would love to know more about the reception of Williams work in Britain in the late 50s and 60s. Did the radical decolonial or eco poetic implications of these words register with British audiences. I think the reception of Williams's work in the late 50s and 60s varies quite dramatically. And it's down to whether the critics writing our parts of the diasporic transnational Caribbean community in London, or as specifically if they are Guyanese nationals. Or if they are members of the to be blunt white English person establishment. And so I think it's, I think the latter use exoticizing language that was currency at that time, primarily. Thank you. We still have 67 participants still on this room, which is terrific and I think it's time for us to invite all our panelists back. Everybody will await any anybody who wants to put up their hands to ask questions. And while we're waiting there are at least two large scale questions, if you can call them that. And one, which has been where did this go, which came in from Toby Upson. I'm interested in delving deeper into how contemporary interventions within colonial collections can lead to something more than a gesture. A gesture like these could be seen as performative moves on the collections part to capitalize on decolonial work. How can collections looking to untie themselves from colonialist legacies. To establish something generative, rather than extractive. So I think that that's a continuation of that conversation as to what does the colonial mean. And then there's a second question from dot who asks about museums and what should museums do in relation to their colonial collections, should they restitute them or continue to offer new frames for them. Who decides and how. So this is, yes, this is, this is at least a series of conferences in itself, but it, you know, it perhaps offers a series of frames as to what's in our audiences mind as a mind as they've been listening to, to your papers. And, and, and would anybody want to, I noticed, Paulie that you had your hand up would you would you want to sort of start with a reflection or two. I do have a reflection but not to those wonderful questions. I don't know maybe you'll want to answer the questions and I can chime in afterwards. Sure. Yes, please beg it. Yeah, I can I can start us off with this because I guess these these the projects that presented where the most closely related to museums and, and actually Julia I'm also struck by your comment just now. You know, is this just sort of tinkering around the edges of the museum which I think it's really important to note of how structural such interventions. So, yes, so collections are my needs to take note that they are very different. I think what is important to understand the histories of these collections, and it is important to understand if objects have been stolen. They must be returned. That's really quite clear. And to establish that is an important process. And there can be interesting dialogues and exchanges that can happen in that process as well so. So, you know, if you want to follow this you know with the with regards to human remains for example, you know from whenever it was possible 2004 it was possible to return human remains because there was a change in legislation. Then there are some very interesting aspects to all of this process of restitution to make your claims and also the types of returns. With which a lot of European museums have are now engaged and politically it is really important. There's also a lot of resistance and actually interestingly. This is a little bit vague but questions for restitution which are so tied up with the colonization it come they come in waves as well. So, interestingly, 1970s there was one of those waves, and then it's sort of apt off again and that was also actually in correlation with questions of environmental destruction so it's kind of interesting maybe it's worth noting that also a sort of great awareness of ecological problems often come as well with the question of where are the collections who do we belong to. How can we address questions and we meaning those who don't have the holdings that the European museums hold. I think that's something to look at at some point in more detail I think. And we are now currently in a sort of in a very active debate on on this on decolonizing processes, I think museums are engaging with it at the moment so that's for example there's this week there's a conference that's convened by the by nuts organization that looks after natural sciences, history science collections in this country and so they're having a whole day dedicated to decolonizing so it's you know it's it's being discussed. So, fire, that is that varies a great deal. And, yeah, and I think there's an awful lot of interesting processes that can be created, they need time, they need to research. And what I had to offer today. It's not ideal. I mean, you know, the question was why did have to, why did the artists have to come to Europe, why did they have to come to London, why did they have to sit at the Nationalist Museum, you know, can we just imagine as a structure, you know what why didn't anything take place in India or in Australia or China for that matter. So I think we need to be much bolder with these attempts to decolonize and I think that will lead to a path where in this environmental crisis we have, I think we will understand better. What if you understand the environmental history is better, how we can deal with current contemporary political as well as environmental problems. Thank you. Holly, would you want to come back on your point. Thank you. Thank you so much. This, this idea kind of came up when I was listening to Eleanor's paper, and then I think also perhaps intersects with Julia so I kept thinking about Amitabh Ghosh's book The Great Derangement, which in his last small Thunder book, he basically talks, he asked why novelists aren't able to talk about large scale environmental disasters. And he brings up this wonderful example of himself, how he was caught in tornado in Delhi and he has this kind of actually almost otherworldly experience but he has never been able to turn it into fiction. Eleanor, when I was looking at your, those wonderful your discussion of Maria Graham and her, her images of kind of like the before and after very staid, not sublime as you articulated so nicely. I just kept thinking about that unthinkability of scale. How is it, how do we picture something beyond you know something that that can also at the same time can also be lived in very basic not basic is the wrong term but I'm just lived in very plain ways. And so I just wanted to raise this notion of unthinkability, and how artists and writers and here this is where I was thinking of your lovely paper Julia where you interwoven the artistic and literary arts so nicely. And that was just, it just really a thought. Maybe we could think for a moment about unthinkability and the use of scale it's something I've been thinking about a lot in my own work. How do we, in terms of archival research, how do we address these kind of very intimate scales to the kind of more expansive that are in fact very difficult, I think to think about. Yeah, I can try to take a stab at addressing that it's also something I'm trying to parse through with Graham and one thing I was repeatedly struck by in researching this material was how was how often the natural forces were referred to by geologists from this movement as their own kind of agent of forces. James Hutton in his theory of the earth talked about the magma beneath the surface as as this as its agent that was acting on the surface of the earth and in all of these really profound ways and you can see Hutton and the artists with whom he was working to picture the phenomena that he's describing, struggling through representational techniques and, and often one thing that happens is this sort of zooming out from, you know, these, these sort of studies of minerals and fossils which are actually how these early geologists started to kind of understand the strata of the earth and to conceive of something like deep geological time and kind of moving out from these intimate pictures to these larger scale lands that start to map geological phenomena across the landscape. And so I think there's something in that moving out and change in scale from the kind of intimate to the grand. It also intersects with the sublime aesthetic which was associated with sort of the unseeable or the invisible or the unfathomable, and there seems to be the sort of sweet spot between a map that's completely abstract. There's a smith's map of the kind of underlying geological strata of the British Isles that's so abstract, we kind of don't have a personal connection, or, or kind of response it doesn't act on us as strongly as, as pictures that hit the sort of middle ground close up and far away. And you'll see, I think that that scale used a lot in geological drawings from from the moment. And Graham seems to be responding to that as well she's not creating these large scale images like, like Martin that act on us or our bodies as viewers but these intimate carefully considered drawings that really place her in in that moment. So yeah, I'll stop there but I think it's a really it's a really provocative question to think about scale and how artists are are employing that differently. So we're sort of, we're already eight minutes over our schedule time. But before we bring this to a close. I thought, you know those open questions that we'd started with. And I wonder if we can pass it to Julia if there's any final reflection that you would want to share before we sort of close this section and the day. They are very, they're very big I think the main reflection I feel there is an appetite for for thinking about what structural change might look like and how our historians relate to the, you know that the grammar of our work going to colonial collections working individually I think all of these parameters could be reports and I would be interested in doing that collectively. And I think there is a lot of space for thinking about how you know this can be the key for anything to do with the organization I think it's that it should be a long term. Hard work project and I don't think it should be individuals doing it so I think that this is maybe for the future more work together around these huge questions. Well I think that sounds like both a daunting but also a hopeful note to end on the possibility for collaboration, the need for this work to continue. I wanted to thank, and I'm sure if we were in physical terms everybody would be clapping loudly that that you will all be be hearing, but if we can have be at least be metaphorically clapping for for Holly for Brigitte for Eleanor and Julia for a really rich set of papers. Thank you and thank you for everyone we still have 50 people who have stayed with us beyond the two hours and 10 minutes. And last but certainly not least. Thank you so much to to Anna read and the conveners for putting this panel together for Ella and Danny for arranging all of this. I think thank you all for being here and being a part of this conversation. I will pass across.