Morfogenesis - cripsis

watercolor wall drawings, wood stick, stick insect

Frieze foucus with Mendes Wood DM, London, 2013

Geometric and Organic usually refer to kinds of forms that exclude each other, as the living exclude the dead, the moving the still, or the subject the object.

Such cultural definitions by opposition belong to a process of differentiation to which we usually refer as Modernity.

Bruno Latour defends that modernity started when Descartes spliced between res-cogitans and res-extensa (the one thinking, and the rest of the world).

Modernity usually brings associated terms as purity, cleaness of forms, and a faith in technique and progress.

Not by chance the colonization and cultural domination of the new world started at the same time as illuminismus took over european thought.

Naturalists name the process by which an animal hides in the forground Cripsis, a word that has the same origin as criptic: Kryptos, the name for that that is hidden in plain sight

Cripsis is normally understood as a defense strategy, by which animals occultate from their predators, but in the beautiful essay Mimesis and the legendary psychasthenia, Roger Caillois states that it is actually not a very good strategy, and proves its failure by analyzing the stomach of different insectivorous birds, where you find equally camouflaged and visible insects.

For Caillois the imitative faculty does not belong to a survival defense, but to a mythological desire of dissolving into the world.

Aren't form, movement and language our ways of dissolve into the world?