April 10, 2025
Dr Nathan Bossoh, Research Fellow in History at Southampton University (UK)
Title: Access, Imperial Exploitation, and the Curation of New Botanical Futures
Abstract: Between July 2024 and February 2025, an exhibition I co-curated opened to the public at the Wellcome Collection, London entitled The Kola Nut Cannot Be Contained. The exhibition sought to explore new ways of narrating human stories about botanical collections through its singular focus on the kola nut, a small bitter-tasting fruit found growing across Western African tropical forests. This methodological approach was adopted as a way to counter the ‘cabinet of curiosity’ style displays common during the European colonial period and still often utilised today. Global plant collections found in contemporary Western museums, herbaria, and botanic gardens are typically the result of European histories of colonial extraction and exploitation - histories that are still largely hidden within botanical scientific circles. However, as my exhibition demonstrates, museums are slowly becoming spaces where marginalised collections and cultures are being brought to light as a way to critically re-evaluate dominant imperial histories. In this exploratory talk centring around 1) the ongoing Kew Gardens re-location controversy, 2) histories of colonial collecting, and 3) my recent exhibition, I will expand upon the three core themes of access, exploitation, and curation as a way of opening further dialogue on the role of museums in the creation (and curation) of new botanical futures.
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Working Group