Charm Offensive

Charm Offensive was commissioned by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, building on Jasmina Cibic’s sustained interrogation of the political gifting of culture and the instrumentalisation of culture and nature in the construction of national ideals. Developed in collaboration with a group of international botanical illustrators, the installation examines botany as an instrument of colonial power, focusing on the transformation of territories such as South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand into what the historian Alfred W. Crosby termed “Neo-Europes”—environments reshaped into offshore extensions of Europe through the transfer of species, systems of knowledge, and regimes of control.

Central to the project is the role of botanical gardens and greenhouses as laboratories of empire. These controlled environments enabled the acclimatisation, cultivation, and global circulation of economically valuable plants, effectively re-engineering distant ecologies to mirror European conditions. In this process, local ecosystems were not only altered but conceptually reorganised—absorbed into a framework that privileged European classification and ownership.

The installation is composed of a series of botanical illustrations depicting plants named after European colonisers, scientists, and imperial agents, including Hans Sloane, Joseph Banks, James Cook, Carl Linnaeus, and George Hibbert. Their legacy persists in the binomial nomenclature system established by Carl Linnaeus, which standardised the naming of organisms while erasing indigenous knowledge systems and vernacular names.

This classificatory structure remains largely immutable: under its rules, species names cannot be altered, even when they commemorate figures implicated in colonial violence or exploitation. Naming thus operates as a form of historical inscription—fixing ideological positions within the language of science.

In Charm Offensive, this logic is inverted. The illustrators were provided only with the Latin names of plants and asked to reconstruct their appearance without visual reference. This reversal transforms taxonomy from a system of authority into a speculative device, exposing the constructed nature of scientific representation and opening it to reinterpretation.

The illustrations are accompanied by engravings of iron fences and barriers referencing the architecture of early botanical gardens. These structures—tools of containment and display—are inscribed with phrases drawn from both horticultural and political vocabularies: rose garden strategies, symbiotic patterns, dormant diversion, scents of persuasion. Language becomes a site where botanical and diplomatic registers converge, revealing how strategies of cultivation and governance mirror one another.

At the core of the work lies a reversal that defines colonial ecology: while European culture was exported and imposed, indigenous nature was appropriated, renamed, and reorganised. Through the mechanisms of naming and classification, local identities were overwritten, and environments were recast as extensions of European space.

Charm Offensive situates these processes within the broader question of naming as an act of power. Once assigned, a name persists beyond its historical conditions, even as its ideological foundations are contested. The work asks whether such names can be undone, and what forms of knowledge might emerge if the systems that produced them were dismantled.

Engaging with the paradox articulated by Jacques Derrida—that naming is both a gesture of possession and an act that escapes ownership—the installation traces how language continues to carry the residues of empire. It proposes a shift from classification as control toward classification as a space of speculation, where the histories embedded in names can be exposed, questioned, and reimagined.