Allegory of the Cave Painting

A 2010 archeological study found that the prehistoric Gwion Gwion paintings in Australia, whose chromatic vividness contrasts with their age and their exposure to sun and rain, are inhabited by “living pigments.” A symbiotic biofilm sustains a process of permanent self-painting, while also etching the pictures deeper into the quartz wall.
The various texts presented here evaluate the Gwion Gwion as an allegorical metabolism developping collaborative relations between antonyms, altered schemas of “origin” and “identity”, contamination and purity, prehistory and modernity, bacterial and human colonies, lost knowledge and scientific advancement.