Travelling Back | Munich, 2024

Travelling Back, curated by Brazilian researcher and curator Sabrina Moura, critically revisits the legacy of a Bavarian scientific expedition to Brazil between 1817 and 1820. 

Presented at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, the exhibition explores the weight of coloniality in the natural sciences, foregrounding the ways in which European expeditions shaped knowledge production about the Global South.

Through historical documents, ethnographic artifacts, zoobotanical illustrations, and published works, Travelling Back unpacks the 14,000 km journey of naturalists Johann Baptist von Spix and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius across Brazil. The exhibition also foregrounds lesser-known narratives, such as the tragic fate of Isabella Miranha and Johann Juri—two Indigenous children taken from Brazil to Germany—whose stories reflect the human cost of these scientific endeavors.

By placing archival material in dialogue with contemporary artistic interventions by Frauke Zabel, Yolanda Gutiérrez, Igor Vidor, Elaine Pessoa, and Gê Viana, as well as a newly commissioned text by writer Micheliny Verunschk, Travelling Back opens up a space of reflection on the colonial legacies embedded in scientific and museological practices, and invites a critical reconsideration of how histories are constructed, remembered, and displayed.