I navigate the herbarium corridors and think of a little text I just read:
"It is fairly widely known that the plants have hatreds between themselves . . . it is said that the olive and the vine hate the cabbage; the cucumber flies from the olive . . . Since they grow by means of the sun’s warmth and the earth’s humour, it is inevitable that any thick and opaque tree should be pernicious to the others, and also the tree that has several roots." quotes Michel Foucault, the renowned French Philosopher who investigated and wrote widely about archives, in his book "The Archeology of Knowledge" (1969).
Foucault was fascinated about the "birth" of scientific knowledge and in his work, he described how power was profoundly intertwined and conditioned the organization of that same knowledge. He was a man fascinated by archives, excavating narratives, and tracing their hidden meanings, waiting to be liberated from dusty archives. He was particularly interested on the threshold objective reason applied to objective knowledge as we know it today.
Fast forward to 2017, I am fascinated by this little text discovered by Foucault, about how hatred between plants, was a way to organize a taxonomy... Which makes me question on the place of subjectivity on a taxonomy, particularly if the point of view through which you are working with the archive is an artistic one. This question feels my mind, as I navigate unending corridors of plants and plants, guided solely by my intuition, my love for beauty, my heart.