Courtney Egan
Extinct in the Wild (Trumpet Flower), 2020
HD video, silent
Size variable
Edition of 3
Copyright The Artist
STATEMENT: I started recording the Angel’s Trumpet’s blooms years ago. I was, and still am, fascinated with its bloom’s color shifts. As I worked, I reflected on my urgent feeling...
STATEMENT:
I started recording the Angel’s Trumpet’s blooms years ago. I was, and still am, fascinated with its bloom’s color shifts. As I worked, I reflected on my urgent feeling that humans must radically adjust our relationship with the vegetal and non-human worlds.
Humans have long been figuring out plants, learning and benefiting from them. The story of the Angel’s Trumpet demonstrates the different paths humans have taken in the search for plant-based knowledge. In South America, where Angel’s Trumpet is native, it has been given many, many names: ...Almizclillo, baumdatura, baumstechapfel, borrachera, (Spanish,“inebriator”), campachu, campanilla, chamico, cimora... floripondio...guarguar, hierba de los compañones, huántac (Zaparo-Quechua), huanto, huánto (Quijo), huántuc (Quechua), huarhuar, isshiona (Zaporo).... maícoma, mai ko, mai ko’ mo, mataperro (Spanish, “dog killer”), misha huarhuar, misha rastrera blanca, qotu (Quechua), saharo, tecomaxochitl (Nahuatl), toé, tree stramonium, trombeteiro (Brazil)... Indigenous peoples have cultivated Angel’s Trumpet for medicinal and shamanic purposes for thousands of years.
In the 18th century, European explorers/botanists who “discovered” the plant were interested in its ornamental appeal and spread it around the planet. After arguing over its taxonomy for a century, a German botanist in 1805 finally gave the flower its own genus “Brugmansia,” honorifically naming it after a Dutch naturalist of the previous century, Sebald Brugmans, and Brugmansia is considered its scientific name.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) - the organization that marks when species are threatened or extinct - designates Brugmansia as EW, “Extinct in the Wild.” This means that the only way that botanists know the species is through captivity, or human cultivation. The plant no longer reseeds in the wild. In essence, humans have supplanted the need for this plant to reproduce on its own. The beauty of this plant-human evolutionary partnership makes me think about what defines our current relationship with the plant world, and what our future will look like. Are we disrupting our ancient tandem relationship with our earthly cohort, the plant world?
I started recording the Angel’s Trumpet’s blooms years ago. I was, and still am, fascinated with its bloom’s color shifts. As I worked, I reflected on my urgent feeling that humans must radically adjust our relationship with the vegetal and non-human worlds.
Humans have long been figuring out plants, learning and benefiting from them. The story of the Angel’s Trumpet demonstrates the different paths humans have taken in the search for plant-based knowledge. In South America, where Angel’s Trumpet is native, it has been given many, many names: ...Almizclillo, baumdatura, baumstechapfel, borrachera, (Spanish,“inebriator”), campachu, campanilla, chamico, cimora... floripondio...guarguar, hierba de los compañones, huántac (Zaparo-Quechua), huanto, huánto (Quijo), huántuc (Quechua), huarhuar, isshiona (Zaporo).... maícoma, mai ko, mai ko’ mo, mataperro (Spanish, “dog killer”), misha huarhuar, misha rastrera blanca, qotu (Quechua), saharo, tecomaxochitl (Nahuatl), toé, tree stramonium, trombeteiro (Brazil)... Indigenous peoples have cultivated Angel’s Trumpet for medicinal and shamanic purposes for thousands of years.
In the 18th century, European explorers/botanists who “discovered” the plant were interested in its ornamental appeal and spread it around the planet. After arguing over its taxonomy for a century, a German botanist in 1805 finally gave the flower its own genus “Brugmansia,” honorifically naming it after a Dutch naturalist of the previous century, Sebald Brugmans, and Brugmansia is considered its scientific name.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) - the organization that marks when species are threatened or extinct - designates Brugmansia as EW, “Extinct in the Wild.” This means that the only way that botanists know the species is through captivity, or human cultivation. The plant no longer reseeds in the wild. In essence, humans have supplanted the need for this plant to reproduce on its own. The beauty of this plant-human evolutionary partnership makes me think about what defines our current relationship with the plant world, and what our future will look like. Are we disrupting our ancient tandem relationship with our earthly cohort, the plant world?
