Muntadas’s piece is made up of a set of nine stoneware dishes with drawings of various plants whose names are written in several languages to form a circular frame. The tenth dish contains a text which reads: “This collection of plates forms part of Malas hierbas [Weeds], a set of crockery that focuses on the importance of plants in processes like travel, displacement and colonisation. It raises the question of how history, legends, orality and fiction contribute to considerations relating to local and trans-national culture. A combination of research and speculative fiction, the set of crockery shows how these plants, native to the Americas, reached the Philippines via Acapulco on the Manila Galleon during the period of Spanish colonisation, which was administered in Mexico City for the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Muntadas, New York, 6-10-2021”.

Muntadas’s work is thus situated at the intersection between botany and colonial processes on which part of contemporary art is working in order to examine matters of a trans-national nature. The crockery forms part of the project Exercises on Past and Present Memories, undertaken in 2019 as a critical review of the colonial past of Spain and the Philippines and its significance for contemporary history. It looks back at the merchandise embarked on the so-called Manila Galleon, a name used to refer to the ships that crossed the Pacific between Manila and certain ports in the Americas, which activated the circulation and exchange of goods, techniques, plants, knowledge, capital, missions, traders and soldiers, and with them cultures and visions of the world that were decisive for the formation of the colonial imaginary. Begun in the sixteenth century, it lasted for two hundred and fifty years and was one of the greatest trade routes in history, connecting Seville with Mexico City and Acapulco to reach the port of Manila, which was linked in its turn with China, South-East Asia, Japan and India. This route is regarded as crucial for the beginnings of the process of globalisation. Muntadas’s artistic proposal thus offers a reflection on the genealogy and exchange of knowledge between East and West, as well as the colonial processes that govern the construction of hybrid identities whose effects are still palpable in the present. In Exercises on Past and Present Memories. Malas hierbas, the porcelain, stoneware or ceramic involved in those exchanges is used as a support for drawings of plants whose generic title refers to the nature of the species that travelled in the galleons from Mexico to Manila, taking root in new ecosystems, and in the process becoming invasive species with the potential to harm native growth. Muntadas regards these dishes as “critical crockery” owing to their representation of the aggressive effects of colonialism on indigenous communities. To emphasise their historical connections, the dishes were made in La Cartuja, the famous Seville ceramics factory whose products also travelled on the Manila Galleon. The design of each dish is based on historical botanical drawings like those of Flora de Filipinas by the Augustinian friar Manuel Blanco (first published in 1837, and later reissued in an illustrated edition), and they thus bear the mark of the inventories of natural sources carried out in the past by religious orders and scientific expeditions as an inherent part of the colonial project.

“Exercises on Past and Present Memories” was Antoni Muntadas’s first exhibition in Manila (2021-2022), the fruit of collaboration between the Ateneo Art Gallery and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo. The Malas hierbas [Weeds] were shown in this exhibition along with other items, which the artist called “presents”, that formed part of the commercial relations between the Philippines and Spain. These include the Mantones de Manila [Manila shawls], which Muntadas uses as supports alluding to episodes in the history and popular culture of the Philippines, and the medallions entitled Portable Monuments to Emigrant Anonymous Workers, together with maps, images of galleons and plates from herbariums. All of them form part of the set of “artifacts” or pieces to be activated that are normally presented in his projects.

Maite Méndez Baiges