At the time of Gessner publishing his folio, it would still be another 300 years until European naturalists would begin to observe these animals in the wild, with Alfred Russel Wallace most tirelessly collecting bird specimens in the Malay Archipelago in the 1850s and 60s.¹⁸ In that respect, this early ornithological entry by Gessner is a testimony to the complex negotiation between facts and fabrication in - herent in the process of wanting to gain a “complete knowledge” of nature—a representation progressively shaped through the observant research and vivid imagination of scholars, artists, and travelers.¹⁹However, what is unique about the early ornithological history of codifying the “bird of paradise” in particular, is that their initial presence as nearly “bodiless” specimens indeed somehow resonated with the mystical tales circulating about them. [Fig. 02 ] Feathers and beaks made the specimens classifiable as birds but, in contrast to more “normal” ones, their immensely colorful plumage, yet disfigured physique encouraged fantastical imaginations.²⁰ The desire for distant worlds and the strange reality of the physical specimens thus coincided in these early, deformed bird-of-paradise skins more uncannily than in other specimens brought to Europe by colonial navigators. But as the biotic regions in the east of the Wallace Line, which contain the habitats of the birds of paradise, were claimed as colonial conquests by different European nations, including the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, British, and Germans, it is necessary to process this history critically. There is neither naivety nor nostalgia in environmental philosopher and extinction scholar Rick De Vos’s words: “The bodies of birds of paradise became discursively and figuratively hollowed out and dismantled […], leaving skin and feathers, signs of allure and desire achieved through the death of other [possible signs]. Birds of paradise were returned as plumes: signs of a transferable beauty and rarity.”²¹ In contrast, birds of paradise have played a vast role in vernacular and Indigenous cultures of the expansive island region for a very long time, reflected in language, lore, dance, song, and ancestral spirituality; these life ways and traditions became overwritten or at least sidelined by the extractivist and racist projections of the colonizers—even as sedentary ornithomaniacs were at work far away.²²


Early Constellational Thinking

Conrad Gessner compiled some of the most respected illustrated encyclopaedias of flora and fauna of his time. This work seems to have grown out of an earlier project also driven by a desire for obtaining a “complete knowledge” that was achieved before publishing the first edition of his 1555 bird book. In the sixteenth century, texts were becoming more available and the holdings of libraries expanded; so Gessner aimed to provide librarians and readers with a detailed, comprehensive overview of all hitherto published eruditions in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. In the 1540s, he thus set out to produce a publication series that would eventually amount to twenty-one books on books. Entitled Biblioteca Universalis, these volumes contain a lengthy bibliographic index referencing printed texts that Gessner looked for in Swiss, Italian, and German libraries. From today’s point of view it appears to be a Borgesian dream of universal knowledge, for the Biblioteca’s scope surpassed the already existing device of a library catalog organized per authors’ names. With great ambition, Gessner delivered annotations that offered evaluations, summaries, and para-textual descriptions of more than 10,000 written works. These were arranged by subject and thematic keywords, thus promising extensive insight and understanding without accessing the original work itself—kind of like a Renaissance version of a contemporary book-summary subscription app like Blinkist. Writing in 1951, Erwin Stresemann described Gessner as someone deeply “motivated by an urge to assemble and organize facts.”²³ Print culture historian Elizabeth Eisenstein characterizes: “To collect and present ‘facts’ required mastery of records made by observers in the past.”²⁴ With respect to the Biblioteca Universalis, this tendency and deftness is reflected in Gessner’s invention of a visual system used for ordering and classifying the evaluated scholarship. Unsatisfied with a merely linear list of available library material, in 1549 he devised a tree structure [Fig. 03] similar to those later designs known from Linnaeus, Darwin, or Haeckel (who all created tree diagrams to visualize living beings in hierarchical sequences). Gessner intended to use this structure for drawing out connections between possible relationships among the accumulated information. Indeed, the tree diagram visualizes a constellation of things; and it organizes these things by situating them spatially. By foregrounding that meaning emerges from actors, contexts, and places coming together, the constellation as method can be one facet of what today we might associate with a curatorial editorial practice.