Botanical collections contribute to safeguarding knowledge about biodiversity; thus, their value increases with every loss of species in the natural world. However, because these collections also enable the commodification of botanical life, they should not be understood as neutral repositories. Since the appearance of the first botanical gardens—whose colonial origins demonstrate the indelible link between scientific research and capitalist commodities—methods of collection and conservation have radically expanded. Exemplary of this broadened biopolitical repertoire, new techniques now allow scientists to vitrify germplasm, thereby preserving it in a state of suspended life.

The research project Musa × paradisiaca L. explores the messy space between natural and artificial dimensions of botanical collecting. In vitro propagation methods, seed banks, and both cryogenic and living collections operate at the intersection of technoscientific research and the market-driven commodification of life itself. This photographic series from Pozzan’s ongoing research project focuses on techniques of biological multiplication in the service of capital accumulation.

The images in the series include those of technicians working on micropropagation (an intensive procedure using in vitro culture) and technologies for agricultural plant breeding (which are based on experimental commercial processes). Such procedures seem to indicate a departure from natural selection; instead, human selection—guided by a series of aesthetic choices catered to consumer markets—guarantees a tedious repetition without difference; nature is rendered a reliable, uniform commodity. By depriving plants of their natural variability, could artificial selection be moving the natural world toward a state of biomonotony?

Such capitalocentric fantasies may be inflected with a quality of science fiction, yet they are entirely real, largely unregulated, and increasingly ubiquitous. How can we begin to fathom the ethical and political implications of such deep material transformations? As the feminist technoscience scholar Michelle Murphy contends in her book The Economization of Life, perhaps we need to imagine a politics that “refuses, disrupts, diagnoses, redistributes, regenerates, and alters, that is responsible to the uneven and vexed relations of becoming, and does not reproduce the same.”11Michelle Murphy, The Economization of Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 145.

Cultivating a space to think about the relationship between natural and artificial selection is a step toward fulfilling this responsibility.