BHAVISHA PANCHIACURATING 
 WRITING

PROSPEKT
Botaniska GöteborG
13-14 September 2018



Written and Directed by Geraldine Juárez

Performed by: Josefina Björk

Curated by: Bhavisha Panchia

3D and VR by: Geraldine Juárez

Additional 3D Flora by: Eva Papamargariti

Documentation by Katerina Lukoshkova

Art Pedagogy by Azadeh Zaghi

Illustration by Jaime Ruelas
A VR-essay and performance, PROSPEKT is a gaze guiding its audience through an exhibition. Tracing practices of colonial knowledge production and bio-prospecting of the seventeenth century to the modelling of contemporary data-prospecting shaping the “digital economy” today, PROSPEKT probes into the systematic search for economically valuable resources. The colonial gaze was determined to collect objects for study, fixing these objects out of time and out of place, in the same way that digital documents offer imagings of the world at a distance via screens. The continuation of this gaze -
the gaze that examines, sorts and determines meaning and value- is not foreign to these institutions of information. This is a prospecting gaze – a wandering ogle that examines, sorts and determines meaning and value.


In 2009, Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, visited the National Museum of Iraq promising to “make the images and ideas of your civilisation [...] available to a billion people worldwide”. A few years later, the Google Cultural Institute, under Alphabet Inc. opened in Paris, and promised to disrupt the gatekeepers of world cultures by offering free data-prospecting services to memory institutions worldwide.

Information corporations monopolise data, which in turn, monopolise
memory, and consequently power. This is the relationship between culture, data and the economy. By institutionalising information gathering practices they dominate the ways in which imagings of the world are produced, classified and observed. The display of the-world-as-an-end-less-digital-exhibition, expanding on the accounts of Derek Gregory and Timothy Mitchell, is the evolution of a thriving practice dating back to colonial bio-prospecting and the development of display techniques from the diorama of the early 1800s to today’s VR headsets.

These platforms, devices, architectures and techniques of display bring distant objects, artefacts and documents into proximity. They are used to map, organize and manage the world’s information, and assert Michel De Certeau’s proclamation that “In history, everything begins with the act of separating, gathering, and turning certain objects that were otherwise distributed into ‘documents’.” Existence is affirmed through perpetual capture: nature into culture into data. All into capital. The collection of objects on display in the museum are documents that chart the history of encyclopaedic projects, which aid the organisation of the world. Apparatuses of gathering, collecting and viewing such as Google Street View Car, Google Cardboard, and Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum that would come to offer the historical cachet lacking in the data-prospecting business of Alphabet, Inc., tell the story of attempts at aggregating the world and its cultures.

Organising information is never innocent.