Pilar Mata Dupont’s The Ague focuses on Kew Gardens – the Royal Botanic Gardens in London – which houses the world’s largest seed bank, conserving the most endangered wild plants for future use. Theatrical and intriguing, in Mata Dupont’s febrile work scientific claims acquire increasingly irrational traits.

Inspired by a case study of the Cinchona tree and an adaption of Virginia Woolf’s short story ‘Kew Gardens’, we are transported into a botanical world in which truths and misinformation, colonial histories, and our ecological future coalesce. With a title referencing malaria-induced fever, The Ague leads us down a never-ending corridor and into a hallucinatory state of broken timelines and unreliable narrators. In this place the natural – the ‘new’ – world is classified and collected, notionally driven by a contemporary  ideal of preservation. But as the gradual tangling of history and fiction erodes certainty, an idea floats to the surface: the drive to preserve as a more palatable disguise for the colonial impulse to control.

Pilar Mata Dupont is a Latinx visual artist and filmmaker living and working between Rotterdam, Netherlands, and Boorloo (Perth), Australia.

Catalogue with text by Gillian Brown.