CHRISTOPH KELLER Christoph Keller, Introduction | Page 32

ANARCHEOLOGY, ESTHER SCHIPPER, BERLIN, 2014
As part of his ongoing examination of the history of science and of the way in which knowledge
is gathered and organized, the artist presented his project investigating Western anthropology, in
particular the history of Western European engagement with the Amazon region. Christoph Keller
created large-scale images based on digital scans of foliage he collected in Brazil. Works in the se-
ries Herbarium Amazonas showed leaves in different states of desiccation. The decay of both
organic and man-made material (on which the leaves were seen to rest in the scans) suggested the
impossibility of halting entropic processes, alluding to the realization that nothing can be preserved,
particularly not states of cultural development.
The images of a green feathery fern-leaf and a velvety fur-leaf, scanned in far more range and detail
than either a human eye can perceive, or a lens-based photographic systems could possibly depict,
printed to measure 150 x 225 cm, were installed on a wall entirely covered with a wallpaper show-
ing colorful vertical scan lines. The irregular pattern was in fact generated by a faulty calibration of
a digital scanning device, which then produced an autopoietic color strip image, akin perhaps to a
machine’s self-portrait. The combination created a visual equivalent of the conflation of nature, tech-
nology and its failure.
In a small basement space of the gallery the artist’s film Anarcheology was screened. Images of
tropical landscapes devoid of humans alternated with text passages, creating a haunting essay film
about Western engagement with other cultures and about the encounters of written language with
oral tradition.
With these works the artist referred to a post-archeological situation, in which the narrative con-
necting an object or an image with a larger historical context was examined. His collecting of foliage
from the Amazon region, for example, recalls the gestures of earlier Western European naturalists
who assembled specimen (from flora, fauna and the animal world, both dead and alive) during their
explorative journeys in order to deposit them in museums of natural history in their own lands. Part
of a wider Enlightenment project to classify and map the world, in some sense these collections (and
the processes assembling them) constitute the beginning of the modern notion of natural sciences.
It is this procedural definition of a discipline by its approach, in this case by its scientific method,
that Keller continuously addresses in his work on the history of scientific inquiry, exploring how the
organization of knowledge influences our thought and results in the sometimes arbitrary distinctions
between what is considered science and what is not.
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