EXHIBITION: Transplanted
Thursday, December 10, 2026
4:00 pm
This event has passed.
Transplanted
German Forestry and the Making of Nations in the United States and Chile
10 December 2026 - 27 January 2027
This exhibition brings into relation two German-trained figures whose careers shaped forestry across the Americas at the turn of the twentieth century: Bernhard Eduard Fernow (1851–1923), trained at a Prussian forest academy, a key figure in the professionalisation of forestry in the United States and Canada, and Federico Albert Faupp (1867–1928), a naturalist trained in Munich and Berlin who, without formal training in forestry, became the architect of Chile's state forestry administration. Although there is no evidence that the two men met, their trajectories reveal a shared history of the global circulation of German scientific knowledge, its formation in academies, universities and museums, and its transformation within colonial, industrial and ecological landscapes abroad, through different paths, one institutionally credentialed and the other improvised.
The exhibition takes this encounter as a curatorial device through which to connect two doctoral research projects: one on eucalyptus plantations in Chile, the other on forest fires in the United States. The first examines how Albert Faupp built Chile's public forestry administration and led its campaign against coastal dune erosion, in which fast-growing eucalyptus and pine plantations became entangled with land tenure, agriculture and the making of state infrastructure. The second considers Fernow's role in the transfer of German forestry principles to North America, opening questions of conservation, fire prevention, state regulation and environmental governance in the American West.
Placing these two figures in dialogue, the exhibition aims to shift the history of forestry away from a national narrative and towards a transnational history of expertise, migration and ecological change. It asks how concepts such as "scientific forestry," sustainability, productivity, order, risk and protection travelled from German-speaking Europe into very different political and environmental contexts, and how they were adapted, contested and materialised in landscapes across the Americas. But also, their stories connect education, migration, empire, extractive industry, plantation forestry, environmental transformation and the making of modern state and corporate infrastructures.
The exhibition connects doctoral research with materials held in the library and archive: forestry manuals, technical reports, maps, photographs, correspondence and institutional documents that speak to German scientific networks abroad. Two books would provide particular points of entry: one tracing the work of a German forester in Chile, the other examining the activities of a German forester in the United States. Read alongside one another, they open a comparative perspective on the circulation of forestry knowledge, its adaptation to different territories and its environmental consequences. These materials not simply illustrate the research but become active points of comparison between archival ambitions and environmental transformations. The exhibition thus asks how archives preserve the history of expertise, while forests, plantations and fire-scarred landscapes record its lasting effects.
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Prof Dr Ines Weizman
Professor of History and Theory of Architecture
Head of PhD Programme
School of Architecture
Royal College of Art
Kensington Gore, London
SW7 2EU
ines.weizman@rca.ac.uk
School of Architecture, Royal College of Art
Postgraduate Research (PGR) Programme