At first glance, Uriel Orlow’s show “What Plants Were Called Before They Had a Name (Guatemala)” appeared serene and innocuous. Swaths of canvas hung from the ceiling, with illustrations of plants thrown onto them by old-school overhead projectors whose emanating light bathed the entire venue in a warm glow. Each projection showed a single page from a publication on medicinal plants issued in the 1970s by the Instituto Indigenista de Guatemala, with a sketch of the plant and a list of ailments it could treat, as well as its name in Spanish. Every entry is disrupted by scruffy handwritten notes: multiple names in different languages, peppered with divergent spellings and inflections, as inscribed by Mayan spiritual guides whom Orlow asked to annotate the book after noting the absence of Indigenous voices therein. These practitioners, who might be deemed quacks by Western science, thereby become the unorthodox authors of an alternative account.

Reconstructing a battle between conflicting epistemologies, this exhibition extended Orlow’s long-term research into plants, a wider project called “Theatrum Botanicum,” as entities that exert influence over cultures, geographies, and modes of understanding. His work draws attention to the social, ecological, and epistemic injustices wrought by colonialism, while contextualizing scientific knowledge production within the Indigenous experience of loss and erasure. While claiming to rely on empiricism and objectivity, Western science upholds the values and biases of the society from which it stems, thereby propagating an ahistorical worldview preoccupied with standardizing ways of knowing through rigid classifications and hierarchies. This bias results in the prioritizing of investigations that support Western technologies and economies that threaten marginalized communities and the planet. By juxtaposing records of Indigenous learning with an official Spanish account, Orlow contests methodologies that claim to eliminate discrepancies and arrive at a universal infallible truth about the nature of things. The scrawls on the projected pages reminded us that there are many ways of naming, and reinstated these multiplicities as necessary elements rather than impediments to scholarship.

In a corner of the exhibition, a single-channel video offered visual documentation of Orlow’s collaboration with the spiritual guides he encountered in his journeys across Guatemala. Without subtitles, only the faint murmur emanating from the screen might have compelled the average Nepali viewer, like myself, to listen to the words spoken by the guides without fully understanding them. Can this incomprehensibility reverse the violence that pervades our attempts to render everything comprehensible?

As part of the fifth edition of Photo Kathmandu, Orlow’s exhibition cohabited with KTK-BELT’s “Indigenous Knowledge Portal”—a project driven by local youth from eastern Nepal who use new media to store and share farmers’ lore about native medicinal plants. This year’s festival called for explorations of ways to think, feel, and relate to the nonhuman world, beyond the grand apocalyptic narrative that spells imminent ecological disaster. Together, “What Plants Were Called Before They Had a Name (Guatemala)” and the “Indigenous Knowledge Portal” signaled the reemergence of nonhegemonic micro narratives and non-Eurocentric nomenclature as starting points for socially and ecologically equitable world-building. They stood in solidarity against the mutilation of Indigenous legacies by remembering what has been erased and uttering what has been silenced.

— Ayushma Regmi