Taking a closer look

The small extract exhibition space in the ETH Main Building is hosting plant and animal specimens, plant and animal specimens, “poison arrows”, utensils for drying plants used in Chinese medicine, and many photographs, all from the collections and archives. And it is well worth taking a closer look - for example at the exhibit with the rather strange name “Andropogon kelleri Hack”.

A rather unassuming dried stalk of grass is attached to a piece of cardboard with adhesive strips. But the exhibit tells us a great deal about the history of the natural sciences and also about the history of ETH Zurich. This herbarium specimen – as this type of plant documentation was called – was collected in Somaliland in 1891 by ETH Professor of Zoology Conrad Keller. Two details on the labels are particularly interesting. One is the word “Expedition”, which indicates that Keller was escorted by soldiers for protection while collecting animals, plants and cultural artefacts in Africa. It is known that the Somalis put up heavy resistance whenever foreigners intruded into their territory.

Classification from back then still has an effect today

Another is that the grass is referred to as a “type”. This means that Keller’s herbarium specimen still serves as a reference for the unambiguous identification and classification of this plant species. The grass species bears Keller’s name. “If Somali researchers today want to describe their native grass species, this might mean that they have to come to ETH to compare their findings with Keller’s type,” explains Monique Ligtenberg, a historian and the curator of the new exhibition at extract.

Ligtenberg wrote her dissertation at ETH on the history of medicine and colonialism. In 2023, she organised an international conference in Zurich on the decolonisation of universities. “Many renowned universities, including the University of Oxford, have begun to scrutinise their own colonial history to see what they turn up,” she says. ETH Zurich is also currently running a project to analyse the university’s colonial past in more detail. In parallel with this initiative, ETH Zurich is now looking to shine a light on the colonial traces that can be found in its own collections.

ETH researchers were avid collectors overseas

Science and research have always been global. In recent centuries, researchers took pleasure in travelling far and wide – not least to set themselves apart from the competition. ETH Zurich, too, founded in 1855, wanted to underscore its international standing by sending experts overseas to research flora and fauna, topography and mineral resources. That’s one of the reasons why the university’s natural history collections house tens of thousands of artefacts from former overseas colonies. One challenge for the current exhibition, with its 60 or so exhibits, was to ensure that the objects selected were particularly representative of the topic of colonialism. It focuses strongly on addressing the provenance of the individual objects.

Searching for historical traces, talking about the present

Biographies of individual European explorers are also shown, but these are deliberately juxtaposed with portraits of indigenous people, without whom many expeditions wouldn’t have been possible. “Rather than discussing who did what and when, we wanted to convey an impression of how research today still bears the mark of colonialism, even if we’re not always aware of it,” Ligtenberg says. So the exhibition keeps asking the question, “What is it like today?” In the second room of the exhibition, visitors can watch videos of current research projects and learn more about what scientific cooperation with the Global South looks like today. In that sense, the exhibition “Colonial Traces – Collections in Context” is a perfect fit with what extract is trying to do, which is to show just how topical and significant historical collections can be for the present.

But isn’t this exhibition on colonialism just a case of ETH tapping into a trendy topic? And is the topic really that relevant for Switzerland, which never had colonies of its own? Michael Gasser, Head of Collections and Archives at the ETH Library, has this to say: “We’re fully aware that Switzerland played its own role and that ETH, with its scientific and technical focus, stands apart from institutions that practised racial studies and the like. But it’s part of the nature of research to analyse and gain insights for the future. And that’s exactly the thought process behind the university’s discussion of colonialism. ETH Zurich is learning from its own history and continuing to develop – so it’s doing exactly what you would expect of a top university.” The exhibition “Colonial Traces – Collections in Context” aims to play a part in that process and give people a chance to take a closer look. And the easiest way to do that is by paying the exhibition a visit.