Very Becoming

On Francesca Woodman and Ray Mortenson


The melding of one into an other. To continue the thinking on shifts of state, water into light, light into solid ... images of decay, decomposition, dissolution. The reduction of architecture to particles. Of self becoming other, becoming wall, floor. Everywhere absence. But still presences linger.

Ray Mortenson, Untitled [The Bronx], 1983

Francesca Woodman, Space 2, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975 - 1976

"How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterritorialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another? The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid's reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing the image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But this is true only on the level of the strata -- a parallelism between two strata such that a plant organization on one imitates an animal organization on the other. At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further. There is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed to or subjugated by anything signifying. Remy Chauvin expresses it will: "the APARALLEL EVOLUTION of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other." "

From Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Ray Mortenson, Untitled [The Bronx], 1983

Francesca Woodman, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-1978