Charles Darwin, together with his son Francis, carefully studied the movement of different species of plants, writing a treatise about their various movements.“The Power of Movements in Plants” (1880) classifies them by their types of reaction to sunlight, gravity, soil pressure and darkness among others.

The device used by the Darwins to map the motion of plants was ingenious but inaccurate, so what a modern tracking of plants will reveal more or less homogeneously as a clear set of spiralling movements, in Darwin’s work would be presented visually as a set of apparent arbitrary movements to the non-expert eye. The gaps in time between moments of motion tracking, traced different varieties of straight and curvilinear lines (although patterns could be identified), which would give a beautiful account of how a plant movement would be like.

The impossibility that (in general) plant movement presents to the human eye has been solved by extension with the development of high speed cameras during the XX century; and yet, the recognition of plants as animated beings is still an ontological challenge.

I use the nutation of two entheogen plants appearing in Darwin’s book (Nicotiana tabacum and Ipomoea tricolor) to juxtapose a differentiated idea of movement, by continuing in drawing the movement traced in the original book, keeping in account their capacity of inducing what in the West is called an “altered state of consciousness”.

https://vimeo.com/164820631?fl=pl&fe=vl