From Gardens to Techno Utopia: Honduras and Malaysia as Botanical Experiments

Separated by 18,000 kilometers, continental Malaysia and Honduras could hardly stand any further from each other geographically. In contrast, this text by Semine Long-Callesen and Nancy Dayanne Valladares traces bridges between the two territories through British colonial and, later, US imperial past and present histories of botanical displacement and agricultural endeavors.

Much of what we learned about each other’s cultures began in the kitchen. We began noticing how certain flavor combinations echoed foods we had tried in our respective food cultures. The aroma of ginger, garlic, and chilies frying in coconut oil called to the Caribbean, and Malaysia sang back. We learned of tropical fruit that, to our surprise, we both grew up eating despite being geographically distant. How did the rambutan, the mangosteen, and the Malayan gutta-percha rubber end up in Central America?

Our shared kitchen experiments led us to uncover, at the personal scale, how the engineering of our respective tropical ecologies shaped labor, national identity and natural resources. We spent time comparing how European and American botanists and scientists travelled, collected, and transplanted seeds around the tropics throughout the 19th century and early 20th century. From the US transnational’s introduction of fruit via Lancetilla Botanical Gardens in Tela, Honduras; to the British empire’s botanical experiments in agri-horticultural gardens in Singapore and Perak, Malaya.

As an artist and a historian, respectively, the task of learning about these histories was a labor of curiosity and grief: of connecting nodes across planetary geographies, and realizing how entire ecosystems and economies can be reshaped by the introduction of a singular species. Over time, land development and extraction culminated in shared patterns of cultivation, for instance, of the rambután, a Malayan fruit now found ubiquitously in Honduras.