Ancient Losses: Manifestations of mourning over the loss of life as it was once known (2022)

Bifurcating life forms, growing with and without base structures, with and without stems, with and without extended family, in arid, rocky, swampy spaces, developing different protection mechanisms, with diverse forms of limbs, being a source of energy and care for other species.

“Tree-Seed-Flower” Steady roots, thick stem, petal leaves. Experiences of beings downloading themselves into the red page.

These series came out of the time I writing “Threads that intertwine, break, and remake tissues: Practices of connection and care of life” (June 2022). After writing during the day, at night I drew less as a conscious decision and more as a physical need to 'release' an uncomfortable feeling. Something I eventually realized was related to the pain felt by ancient forms of life, after surviving cataclysmic events that destroyed 70% to 95% of all life around them. The difficulty of being survivors of a traumatic event, the witnessing of massive loss, and the need for mourning, as well as the realization of the resilience of life that flows through them.

They say that about 444 million years ago, Ordovician-Silurian extinctions wiped out about 85% of all Ordovician species. That at the time of the extinction, most of the 'complex' multicellular organisms lived in the sea, and the only evidence of life on land are rare spores of small, early land plants.
That the extinction event abruptly affected all major taxonomic groups and resulted in the disappearance of one-third of all brachiopod and bryozoan families, as well as numerous groups of conodonts, trilobites, echinoderms, corals, bivalves, and graptolites. Losses along the continental shelves resulted in a great loss of biodiversity.

The drastic decrease in competition and the vacant niches left by the organisms that perished in the catastrophe made it possible for sponges to thrive and even dominate some marine ecosystems in the aftermath of this biotic crisis. They also say that sponges may have contributed to the recovery of other clades (groupings of species related to a common ancestor), helping to stabilize sediment surfaces, which allowed suspension-feeding bryozoans, brachiopods, corals and other sessile organisms to recolonize the seafloor.

One of the first signs of the approaching crisis is thought to have been the incremental die-off of graptolites (colonial animals) followed by a rapid decline. In this, one reads a parallel with contemporary changes in global biodiversity that may eventually be followed by a rapid decline.

I look at a drawing of something that resembles a caterpillar, and I am not sure who wanted to manifest themselves. A tardigrade? A myriapod? Or is it really a caterpillar? I search for images about the various forms of these three, and this leads me to the caterpillars of the emperor moth, or Saturnia pavonia, named after Saturn, the Roman god of wealth and agriculture, and I notice the ancients connections between the knowledge of interexisting soil life and wealth. I read that moths were present in the Carboniferous, about 300 million years ago, and began to diversify largely in synchrony with angiosperms. The wings of moths and winged insects in general evolved from a protrusion of the legs of an ancestral crustacean. The "caterpillar" stage, part of the metamorphosis process, is an adaptive value whereby different stages require different types of food and habitat, which reduces competition between the different stages through which the individual passes. Moths and plants interacted some 50 million years before the first dinosaur moved across the Earth, and those interactions helped give rise to the diversity we see on our planet today.

Series of 30/100 drawings. Color pencil and pastel on red paper (21x29,7cm).

References:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1907847116

https://noticiasdelaciencia.com/art/48501/las-mayores-extinciones-masivas-en-la-tierra
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-first-mass-extinction-event-explained-end-ordovician