Mimosa pudica

Touch-me-not

The pudica is a pose. She is a figurative, silent representation of an interior state. As a studied attitude, the pudica is seen through the spectator’s gaze, seeing herself. She is formed by the spectator, oriented toward violation, protesting the touch that has already taken place. The more theatrically the pudica refuses herself to us, the more we access her inaccessibility, and in doing so we fulfil her function.

This refusal—and the suspension of the moment before it is swept aside—constitutes the eroticism of the pudica in which the distance between the one who desires and the object of that desire is held infinitely just shy of contact. (In that eternity, the promise that contact will be made is simultaneously legible.) The pudica, too, is shy. All her blood is on her skin; she is utterly revealed, transparent and fully lit, her genitals outside of the body. Her attempt to cover herself falls short, too. A set of three dots measure the space between her palm and her breast, between her digits and vulva—an ellipsis of air.

Mimosa pudica is an inconspicuous plant, noteworthy first for its motion (which is a perceptible, reproachful drawing-in of the leaves at the touch of a finger), then for the reading of a particular affect in that motion (the plant’s name includes “shy,” “sensitive,” “humble,” “shameful,” “touch me not,” and “noli me tangere”). We interpret the plant’s responsiveness as a form of protest, as a rejection of contact, in the moment when we also acknowledge our desire for contact with it in order for it to manifest its response. We want to see ourselves recognized; we want to know that we are heard, seen, and felt, that we have made an impact, even if our touch can only be damaging. In describing the plant as ashamed, sensitive, shy, and then touching it anyway, we assign it pain.

The motion of the Mimosa pudica is not only its shrinking and closure, however. In South America, where it is native, it is called morí-viví for its pantomime of dying and returning to life. The plant, therefore, has two expressions—that of registering contact and that of resurrection. Perhaps it is also important that a pose is a pause, that it is a moment not in time but extracted from it, elongated, and stylized. The fastmoving plant, its vegetal hum transposed into an animal pitch, elasticizes time, rotates it, returns it onto itself. The figure of time for Mimosa pudica is not the arrow but the ellipse, the rotating triangle defined by three points: the desirer, the desired, and the infinite reaching that comes between them.

Note: This text accompanies the installation Noli Me Tangere (2013), in which a Mimosa pudica is held open in an otherwise dark room by the light from a video projection of a hand drawing an ellipse. Pudica, a Latin word meaning shy or ashamed, is an art historical pose depicting a nude female figure covering herself suggestively.

Caroline Carlsmith

Mimosa pudica

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becoming-Botanical