Lourenço Soares

The Naturalist's Doubt (Knowledge & Furniture)

video installation (4min, loop, no sound), iPhone, stone; 2021

The Naturalist’s Doubt (Knowledge & Furniture) is a work of speculative fiction that questions the foundations of the natural sciences. A naturalist — a figure inspired by Carl Akeley and Carl Linneaus — writes a text message expressing his anxieties about the history of collecting and displaying in the natural history museum. 3d models from museum furniture are fossilized in rocks. They point to the role of display technology in reifying the conceptual structures of western thought.