Feral assemblages (2021) is a split-screen video essay/ instillation that centres around the story of the ‘invasive’ plant Buddleia Davidii and its encounter with the infrastructural project of the railway in Britain. Buddleia was brought to Europe in the late 1800’s from China by a ‘missionary botanist’ as a desirable ‘ornamental exotic’ plant. Once an escapee from Victorian gardens it proliferated rapidly along the railways as its seeds were carried and distributed by the wind tunnels created by trains, and the tracks rocky embankments provided an ideal environment for it to take root. The material and symbolic dimensions of this story raise multiple lines of inquiry; one being the entangled consequences of the 19th century imperial plant trade and the intense modification of land through the making of industrial and imperial infrastructure within the metropole and its ex-colonies. Another traces the origins of the language and classificatory schema which reassigned buddleia’s status to an ‘invasive alien’. It looks at how the development of 17th century botanical taxonomy effected a particular kind of ‘epistemic violence’, that resulted in the development of scientific racism which was ‘central to upholding capitalist relations of exchange and the justification of colonial expansion’ (Sheik;Gray,2015). Furthermore, botanical taxonomy ‘in standardising and facilitating global information exchange’(Von Zinnenburg, 2017) can be understood as ‘the base of all economies’, the abstraction and compartmentalisation of labour included. As such, the development of capitalist labour practices are inferred throughout, through either image or sound. Feral assemblages considers how the development and intersections of these trajectories shape contemporary ideas about race, migration and ecology in Britain.
Buddleia is everywhere in Britain, and especially in London. It inhabits the city with such ubiquity that it’s almost impossible not to notice or to be familiar with, but it is often overlooked and not many consider its origins or what its presence symbolises. An apt analogy for the ways in which colonial history can be obscured by its ‘hypervisibility’ with in the old imperial centre. Taking buddleia as the main figure in the video essay sought to use the viewer’s familiarity with the plant to engage them in a wider metaphor for the daily encounters we have with colonial legacies but do not always register. Furthermore, the instillation was shown in one of the 878 railway arches under the viaduct of the London and Greenwich railway built in 1836. This line was the first commuter line built in the capital and connected Greenwich and the Royal Deptford Docklands- ‘the ground from which, more than any other, grew the British Empire’(Bates, 1980)- to London Bridge. The entire stretch of the façade of the viaduct is covered in Buddleia Davidii, producing a powerfully situated context for the work to be shown. Entering into the arch, as the video essay beamed through the darkness amplified the messages and images shown on the screens. The vibrating hum of the periodic passing of trains overhead further enlivened the work, producing an embodied and dynamic response as well as placing it firmly in the present.
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This work sought to connect the histories of the city and of the area to the lived experience of the individual and the collective, whilst allowing these insights to resonate through the broader impacts of British Imperialism in other parts of the world. Thus, the latter part of the work deals with the effects of the introduction of the imperial railway in the Bengal Delta, and its entanglement with the proliferation of the imported ornamental plant turned ‘invasive species’, Eichhornia crassipes or the Water Hyacinth. This expanded the former part of the video-essay to concretely bring forward the immense human and ecological cost of the project of British colonialism, divided of course on a racialised axis. Connecting these stories through the narrative of an ‘invasive species’ encounter with the railway was a methodological device to raise the themes of ecology, capitalist exchange, race, empire and infrastructure in a way which reflected their interconnectedness.
