Visual artist Singh Shubhangi

If you join the dots—it’s a map

Taiteellinen työ / siihen pohjautuva työ | Kaksivuotinen

In 1990 a rock arrives in Turku from Pourewa Islands in New Zealand, formerly known as Spöring Island, named after the first Finn who journeyed to the region. Herman Spöring, a Turku born naturalist and botanist was enlisted to become part of a team of botanists seeking a ship that would allow them to observe the Transit of Venus — a cosmological event taking place along the Pacific route (1768). Being granted with one by the British Royal Society, Spöring and the other botanists would eventually be aboard the now-infamous HMS Endeavour, commanded by Captain James Cook. Far from being an innocent carrier, the ship, as we now know, would go on to map the region on that same voyage, which would subsequently lock in Australia, New Zealand and eventually, many of the Pacific and Polynesian islands to their colonial conquests by the British empire. The rock that is currently housed in the Aboa Vetus Ars Nova Museum is not a passive memorial but an active witness in the long and entangled narrative that ties Finland to a series of charged events that has forever altered the course of history. The project looks at science and botany and their complicit role in advancing imperialist and extractivist ambitions. By allowing an event to reveal the next in short, accessible and subjective episodes, a larger narrative begins to unfold thus also forming a lattice of knowledges through plural, interrelated stories. The objective of the project is to map episodic histories as a guiding force to learn from even as we continue to storm into present and future neo-colonial and extractivist projects. The project aims to produce visual artefacts in the form of a video developed in combination with a series of lecture – performances that aim to share, gather and build upon facts, reciprocally, along with others who are working within the subject. It is meant to be a work that is porous with much room for seepages ⁠— a living record of events, moments and histories.