Debora Hirsch

When Albert Eckhout (1610–65)—court painter to Dutch governor-general Johan Maurits—set off for Northeast Brazil in 1636, it was his first venture outside of the Dutch Republic. Maurits, with whom Eckhout traveled, had a particular interest in natural history, and it would be Eckhout’s duty to capture the astonishing natural resources and general fecundity of seventeenth-century Dutch Brazil through his art. During the seven years that Eckhout would reside in Brazil, he created hundreds of drawings and oil studies that he would later use to paint exquisite still lifes. The excitement and allure of Eckhout’s initial encounters with untamed Brazilian flora seep from these paintings; his gleaming green coconuts, ripe melons, and luscious cashew apples convey a freshness and bounty that beckons to viewers, eliciting astonishment and encouraging them to taste and experience such exotic abundance for themselves. At the same time, paintings of the colony’s natural resources asserted the power and status of the Dutch Republic and its governor-general among the seventeenth-century aristocratic elite; the works created by Maurits’s court painters were given as gifts and ended up in the collections of King Frederik II of Denmark and Louis XIV in France, among others.[i]

Colonial conceptions of the natural world are embodied not just in the paintings of European travelers, but also in the collections formed by traveling biologists. The students of the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus (1707–78), for example, voyaged across the globe gathering plant species and naming them according to European systems of knowledge. The preserved specimens that these biologists amassed would, in many cases, form the basis of institutional herbaria that today continue to mirror asymmetrical power structures; the majority of plant specimens collected from the tropics—where, significantly, the most plant diversity naturally exists—are now housed in Europe and the United States.[ii]  These botanical resources are perhaps even more crucial now than they once were; they can be used, for example, to understand the progress of invasive species, or to help guide conservation planning.

The lyrically unfolding imagery of the video art in the Firmamento series similarly works to uncover cross-temporal information from the colonial past and present, with heavy references to internet culture. In Hirsch’s titular video, Firmamento, the artist has created a visual that meditatively unfolds. As she juxtaposes footage from the natural world with colonial imagery, she layers dotted and geometric configurations generated by digital software. By placing these together, Hirsch emphasizes their constant recurrence and connections in the current time.

In the series Donotclickthru (2016), Debora Hirsch utilizes humor, irony, and the codified language of clickbait to create works that comment on the type of communication facilitated by the internet. Hirsch explores how technology allows for interactivity and the possibility of democratic conversations, it also asks users to pay a price: lack of privacy, overexposure, and a predicted provoked reaction. 

Much like actual clickbait, they enticingly make reference to possible future knowledge through seemingly random images. Rather than potentially exploiting the internet user, these drawings leave the viewer in a humorously contemplative state. Originally presented via an interactive website, Donotclickthru straddles a space between the analog and the digital. 

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