The Colony - Archive purports to be an archive of picture postcards depicting a single botanical garden. In actuality, these are botanical gardens established in the colony of the former British Empire, created to study plants and more importantly cultivate viable crops to be grown in colonial plantations. Many were started by the British East India Company and influenced by the English landscape garden movement, and thus share similar aesthetics despite being scattered across the globe.
To foreground this homogeneity, Marvin draws from this collection of vintage postcards, placing them alongside original postcards created based on his research. Part of a larger project that examines the impact and agenda of colonial botanical institutes, The Colony - Archive is an uncanny reveal of the archetypal botanical garden as an impossible gathering of otherwise unrelated plants and architectural spaces in an attempt to covert land and botany for economic purposes.
Exhibition View: The Seeds We Sow @ Mizuma Gallery
Image Credits - Mizuma Gallery
The Colony investigates the network of Botanic Gardens that were established in the wake of colonisation. Surveying underlying agendas and narratives of this institution.