Mediation and Representation

Orangutans did not become internationally famous overnight. Rather, representations of them have changed over the years. In the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, for example, orangutans were widely depicted as wild, uncannily human-like creatures to be collected by colonial officials, travelers and naturalists as trophies or specimens. It was only from about the 1960s and 1970s that—thanks to a combination of scientific interest, advocacy and emerging environmentalist trends—orangutans became framed as endangered species that needed to be saved. Their visibility as such grew further from the mid-2000s, when they were increasingly cast as victims of the oil palm industry, which was destroying rainforests in Borneo and Sumatra. Most recently, orangutans and their rainforest homes have become potent symbols of planetary health and well-being, their fates linked to climate change, massive biodiversity loss, and transboundary environmental threats such as forest fires and transboundary haze.

Images, however, don’t always speak for themselves. Turning photographs of orangutans or scientific data into conservation messages takes deliberate and concerted work. This process involves representing orangutans, extinction and conservation in certain ways, and aiming to have those representations reach the right people and have the right effect. It also involves the work of mediation by different parties, from activists to local community facilitators, who may translate, explain, localize and discuss conservation messages. However, it also can also involve failure, misunderstanding and even creativity as audiences respond in different ways.

This gallery explores how orangutan conservation is represented, and re-presented, to various audiences for various purposes and through different acts of mediation. Some images reveal how orangutan extinction is made visible to faraway publics in the United Kingdom, such as through the awareness-raising and fundraising work of orangutan charities and their supporters Others shed light on how conservation messages are disseminated, translated and responded to in different contexts in Borneo and Sumatra. In some cases, these have been enthusiastically picked up; in others, they have simply been ignored or incorporated into everyday routines.

Like the exhibits in the Collaboration and Contestation gallery, these examples reveal how ‘saving the orangutan’ is neither a universally agreed-upon project, nor always relevant to people who live in and around orangutan habitat. This in turn raises the challenging but important question of how to both save the orangutan and acknowledge, respect, and promote the well-being of the rural communities who also live in these forests.