Terra Nullius Times Two: Reading d’Agata after Lesueur and <i>Vice Versa</i>

Tracing a line across the career of John West-Sooby and between the two cultures that his work and life have straddled, this article begins by examining West-Sooby’s writings on the drawings of Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, one of the artists-in-residence on the Baudin expeditions. When considered alongside the work of Nicolas-Martin Petit, one of the other artists on Nicolas Baudin’s voyages, Lesueur’s work can be seen as a different version of the terrible premonition that comes to Baudin at Port Jackson, a realization of what would be required to maintain the illusion that the lands on which they found themselves were a terra nullius. To do so, this article draws a line between the drawings of Lesueur analyzed by West-Sooby and the recent work of photographer Antoine d’Agata in a very different kind of terra nullius (or terra annullata ), the Ukraine of 2023. The possibility of the relation established between these two bodies of work, produced more than 200 years apart, comes from not only the fact that they are both produced in a space that can be described as a form of terra nullius, a space in which sovereignty is annulled, not recognized or else actively erased, but also a certain aesthetic resonance between them that might be thought of as an artistic response to the atrocities committed or yet to be committed in the lands where they find themselves.