South African artist Barbara Wildenboer will present her first solo exhibition in Côte d’Ivoire with Invasive Archives, opening at LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery in Abidjan on 17 September 2026. Bringing together altered encyclopaedias, botanical materials and sculptural forms, the exhibition examines how systems of classification shape knowledge, landscapes and histories.
LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery will present Invasive Archives, a solo exhibition by South African artist Barbara Wildenboer, from 17 September to 23 December 2026. The presentation marks Wildenboer’s first solo exhibition in Côte d’Ivoire and introduces her interdisciplinary practice to Abidjan through a body of work concerned with archives, ecology, colonial histories and the systems through which knowledge is organised and transmitted.
A private opening in the presence of the artist will take place on 16 September, ahead of the exhibition’s public opening the following day.
At the centre of Invasive Archives is an understanding of the archive not as a fixed repository of information, but as a living and continually changing ecology. Knowledge, language and power are placed in conversation with seeds, roots, spores and other organic forms, allowing Wildenboer to consider how both information and biological matter travel, settle and transform their environments.
The exhibition takes V. Y. Mudimbe’s concept of the “Colonial Library” as a point of departure, turning attention towards the systems of classification that have historically shaped understandings of landscapes, histories and the natural world. Rather than treating the archive as neutral, Wildenboer investigates the structures through which
knowledge is named, categorised, collected and given authority.
Dismantling the Encyclopaedia
Books become both subject and material within the exhibition. Wildenboer works with altered Kennis encyclopaedias alongside maps, paper pulp, bookbinding materials, plant fibres, gum arabic and porcelain. Encyclopaedias are dismantled and reconfigured, while botanical fragments, geological forms and cartographic structures enter what would conventionally be understood as the space of the archive.
Through this process, the authority associated with the printed encyclopaedic page becomes unstable. The works move beyond simply critiquing classification; instead, Wildenboer constructs alternative systems in which plants, books, objects, colonial histories and human and non-human actors can inhabit the same archive.
This approach draws on what the exhibition describes as “fictional encyclopedism”. The encyclopaedia, traditionally presented as an authoritative instrument for organising and authenticating knowledge, becomes a speculative structure. Fact and fiction, memory and taxonomy, material and information begin to overlap.
One of the works illustrated in the exhibition material, Invasive Archives III, makes this transformation particularly visible. The altered book expands beyond its conventional rectangular boundaries as intricately cut and layered printed material grows outward from the encyclopaedic pages. The framed work measures 57 by 75 centimetres.
Rather than functioning merely as containers of information, books are therefore transformed into sculptural objects. Text, image and physical matter coexist, challenging the distinction between reading an archive and encountering it materially.
Plants as Carriers of History
Botanical life occupies an equally significant place in Invasive Archives. Prickly pear, moth vine and cassava appear throughout the body of work, but Wildenboer approaches them as more than botanical specimens.
Each carries histories of movement, cultivation, trade and displacement. Their ability to travel across territories, establish themselves in new environments and alter those environments becomes a parallel for the circulation of knowledge itself. Knowledge, in Wildenboer’s formulation, cannot be entirely contained: it is transported, translated, appropriated and continually reconfigured as it passes between places and systems.
This relationship gives the exhibition’s title particular significance. The archive itself begins to behave like an invasive species: moving across boundaries, taking root, transforming its surroundings and creating unexpected relationships.
It also complicates familiar oppositions between what is considered native and alien, or natural and constructed. Geography and natural-history encyclopaedias meet invasive plant species, botanical specimens and sculptural forms, while plant skeletons, paper, porcelain, wood and metal become carriers of ecological and cultural memory.
The result is an archive that refuses permanence. Instead of attempting to stabilise knowledge, Invasive Archives proposes a structure continually altered through contact — an ecology of fragments in which different histories, species, materials and forms of knowledge can coexist and produce new relationships.
Landscape as a Living Archive
Born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1973, Wildenboer works across disciplines to explore relationships between language, ecology and material culture. Her practice considers landscapes themselves as living archives carrying traces of environmental transformation, colonial histories and forms of memory extending beyond human experience.
Plants, within this framework, are not passive elements of a landscape. They participate in shaping place, perception and cultural meaning. Drawing from botany, ecology, archaeology and the history of natural science, Wildenboer examines how practices of naming, collecting and classifying have influenced not only how environments are understood, but also how people understand themselves.
For Invasive Archives, these longstanding concerns converge around the physical archive. By dismantling and reconstructing archival materials, Wildenboer suggests that archives are never neutral or complete. Like landscapes, they are rewritten by environmental, political and cultural change.
Gazele Guirandou, co-founder and director of LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery, describes Wildenboer’s exhibition as a space where “books, plant life and material” become territories through which the circulation of knowledge, histories and forms can be reconsidered. She invites audiences to approach the presentation as an “archive in motion”, attentive to the connections, fragments and narratives that emerge from it.
The exhibition also continues the gallery’s broader engagement with contemporary artistic practices from the African continent. Established in Abidjan in December 2015, LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery describes its programme as one rooted in dialogue, cultural transmission and exchange, extending a family history in the city’s art scene that began with Arts Pluriels in the 1990s.
With Invasive Archives, that emphasis on transmission takes on both conceptual and material dimensions. Wildenboer asks what happens when an archive is no longer understood as a stable collection of the past, but as something capable of growth, contamination and transformation. In doing so, the exhibition turns classification itself into a field of inquiry — asking who and what enters an archive, what remains outside it, and how established structures of knowledge might be opened to other histories, materials and forms of life.
Barbara Wildenboer: Invasive Archives
LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery, Cocody Mermoz, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. The exhibition runs from 17 September to 23 December 2026, following an invitation-only opening on 16 September. Admission is free, with the gallery open Tuesday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
