Charm Offensive 2023

Charm Offensive is an installation Cibic created in collaboration with a group of international scientific botanical illustrators. The project aims to address the colonial violence imposed by national and political powers both on nature and culture. Borrowing the phrase that was first used to describe the political tactics of adversaries in the Cold War, Charm Offensive denotes a calculated campaign that uses propaganda values to gain favour or support.

The project is comprised from a series of illustrations of plants that bear the names of the first European colonisers and botanists that became agents of empire and as such facilitated a global information exchange that often contested territories and their resources.

With plant ‘discovery’ by the European colonisers, and the ‘gifting’ of names that followed the newly invented Linnaean taxonomy, local knowledge would be erased, and local names annulled. As such, botany became complicit with the destruction of worlds taking place within the colonial project. The Linnaean taxonomy system with its binomial nomenclature presents one of the last systems of patriarchal control that has not been problematised and rewritten; namely its rules do not allow for the names of organisms to be changed, even when they bear tribute to politically problematic namesakes – including colonisers and slave owners.

In Charm Offensive, Cibic reverses the historical strategies of European ‘re-discovery’ of species – where their newly gifted Latin name would be the last to arrive in the process of their re-inscription within the European ‘civilised’ world. The artist reached out to botanical illustrators and altered the standard workflow of their practice – giving them only the Latin name of the plant to use as the reference for its proposed appearance. Cibic selected plants whose names honour the historically celebrated plant hunters and colonisers – who in compliance aided the colonial enterprise and became instruments of imperialist expansions. Working with botanical namesakes of Hans Sloane, Joseph Banks, James Cook, Carl Linnaeus and George Hibbert – the proposed illustrations decode the language of the discipline and insert a feminist decolonial potential of rewriting the history of patriarchal domination.

The proposed botanical illustrations are exhibited alongside a series of engravings of iron grate fences and barriers of the first botanical gardens, whose networks served as laboratories for the acclimation and exchange of economically valuable plants. Instead of names of the gardens themselves, the iron bars bear phrases drawn from botany that have been directly borrowed by the political and diplomatic context: rose garden strategies, symbiotic patterns, dormant diversion, scents of persuasion…

The spaces of political and national power continue to thrive on botanical depictions and floral arrangements as ‘unobtrusive’ politically – either as floral attributes to conference rooms or ‘benign’ still lives decorating the spaces of political power. But is should be the darker side of political servitude of plants which these very spaces should be debating, a side which is exponentially relevant for our society today.