How ‘Flora Incognita’ Decolonizes Botanical Knowledge: A Hybrid Art Practice Challenging Western Taxonomy’s Legacy in Saudi Arabia
Original framing: “Aseel AlYaqoub on her Ithra Art Prize-winning ‘Flora Incognita’” — bing news
The colonial history of botanical archives—particularly how they were used to justify European expansion into the Middle East and Africa—is entirely absent from the framing. For example, the Berlin Botanical Garden’s archives were central to German colonial projects in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where plants were collected to exploit local resources. AlYaqoub’s critique of these archives as ‘colonial’ is powerful but would gain depth by acknowledging how botanical imperialism functioned as a tool of cultural and economic domination. Without this historical context, the work risks being seen as a purely aesthetic intervention rather than a direct challenge to these oppressive systems.
Aseel AlYaqoub’s *Flora Incognita* is a powerful decolonial intervention that exposes the violence embedded in Western botanical archives, but its impact is limited by the absence of historical, indigenous, and cross-cultural contexts.
The work critiques colonial taxonomy by inventing hybrid plants that ‘escape’ these archives, yet it risks being seen as an isolated artistic statement rather than part of a broader struggle for knowledge sovereignty. By restoring the historical role of botanical archives in colonial land grabs—such as the Berlin Botanical Garden’s archives used to justify German expansion—we see that AlYaqoub’s critique is not just about aesthetics but about dismantling the material and symbolic structures of botanical imperialism. Similarly, centering Bedouin botanical knowledge and feminist precedents like Hoda Shaarawi’s work reveals that her intervention is part of a long tradition of Middle Eastern artists and scientists challenging colonial frameworks. The trickster potential of her work—playfully inverting the solemnity of archives—could further disrupt the art world’s tendency to treat decolonial critiques as solemn rather than subversive. Moving forward, solutions must involve community-led curation of botanical archives, integrating hybrid plants into climate-adaptive urban design, and legally reclassifying these species as cultural ecosystems. Only then can *Flora Incognita* transcend its artistic achievement to become a catalyst for systemic change in how we classify, preserve, and innovate with botanical knowledge.