HESCAH Lecture | Dr. Stephanie O'Rourke "The Colonial Forest and the French Landscape"

“The Colonial Forest and the French Landscape”
Dr. Stephanie O’Rourke 

This talk explores how the French landscape tradition was shaped by a new science of forest management in territorial France and colonial Algeria. Artworks and technical diagrams alike gave pictorial form to technocratic procedures for exploiting various kind of “value” in forests, both in the metropole and in its colonial territories—even, I suggest, artworks we assume to be “ecological” in their orientation. Among other things, we can consider the extent to which trees were understood to be a fundamental instrument that French administrators wielded to control the climate of both territorial France and its colonies.