Too Close in Time for The Comfort of Mythmaking is a photographic installation that employs an array of printed images sourced from museological, scientific, and conservationist archives. The project started in 2017 when I inherited a bird watching field guide focused on birds from Venezuela, co-authored by William Henry Phelps Jr. and Rodolphe Meyer de Schauensee. The field guide itself has become a collector’s item in recent years, recognized as a piece of history not only for ornithology but as a key document of Phelps’ legacy in the country. I became interested in the historical significance of the field guide after studying the influence of William H. Phelps Sr. in the development of modern Venezuela. An American ornithologist, Phelps Sr. settled in Venezuela in the early 20th century and became a businessman who consequently established coffee plantations, department stores (commercializing American imports), and later founded the first radio station in the country, Radio Caracas. Today, the most notable aspect of Phelps’ legacy is the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, the largest collection of Modern and Contemporary art in the world. I felt motivated to study the Phelps’ family to understand how their influence defined politics and cultural identity in Venezuela.

Since 2017, the project has expanded exponentially as I have encountered more material and similar intersections of power, capitalism, and the exploitation of nature through conceptions of the “exotic.” As most of my work as an artist draws heavily from postcolonial theory in Latin America, Too Close in Time for The Comfort of Mythmaking is an attempt to map colonialism through endeavors in science and conservation, with a close look at museums, collections, and the ideological infrastructure of institutions that focus of preserving cultures that have “disappeared.”

Another notable component of this project departs from a National Geographic issue published in the 90s that focuses on the conservation of macaws Ara ararauna along the Tambopata river in Peru. My friend and collaborator, ornithologist Natalia Piland, contributed in many meaningful ways to this project. The background story for this seemingly benign conservationist initiative shares some similarities with that of the Phelps family. Charles Munn III, the author of this National Geographic spread, established an eco-tourism business in the middle of the Tambopata reserve; this entrepreneurial project has caused controversy given that it’s essentially an American business extracting from Indigenous communities and natural resources in the Amazon.

Too Close in Time for The Comfort of Mythmaking is an exercise that traces capitalism and its association to Western ideology performed by American and European scientists, and the spaces that ultimately house displaced cultures under the claim of disappearance.

—Jacobo Zambrano-Rangel

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.