Abstract
This piece offers a biting reversal of colonial logic by placing the white colonizer Carl Hagenbeck, known for organizing ethnographic exhibitions, within a fictional “garden of acclimatization” for whites. The term references the 19th-century practice of displaying Indigenous peoples in so-called human zoos to justify imperial conquest and scientific racism. Here, territorial control is reimagined: rather than colonized bodies being observed in foreign lands, it is the colonizer who is restrained, adorned with bells, and subjected to spectacle. The body becomes a terrain of critique: shackled, exposed, and instrumentalized, evoking the violent ways in which race, geography, and power intersected. By turning the colonial gaze back on itself, the work challenges viewers to confront the spatial and corporeal legacies of empire.
Citation
Ticona, Mirna. 2022-2023. 'Jardín de aclimatación de blancos [White Acclimatization Garden]'. Dispossessions in the Americas. https://staging.dia.upenn.edu/en/art/ACHI018/
