A garden lamp that time and atmospheric conditions have slowly transformed into an object superbly integrated with its surrounding environment. Located in a small garden, its shape, size and material suggest a mimetic relationship with the surrounding natural forms: fruits, flowers, leaves, branches, etc. The electric cable that supports it and feeds the bulb is covered with moss and layered organic matter. It was once white, but it now adopts a complex range of colors and it is seamlessly camouflaged with the thin, drooping surrounding branches. At night the light is soft and the perforations in the ceramic shell emit a subdued and unpredictable glow, particularly if it is windy and the object sways. Did someone design this object for its current state of absolute integration with its context, or was it just a happy, involuntary development? Certain materials develop extraordinary patinas and surface transformations by the mere action of time and atmospheric conditions. But the possibility of objects designed to gradually integrate with their environment –whichever this environment might be- is very appealing: planned mimetism, we could call it, a designed, gradual process of aging; objects that, like people, would change their appearance as they age: perhaps even their end would also be part of the design and at some point they would crack, fall and break, and then slowly dissolve into the ground and leave no trace. This lamp was not intentionally designed that way; but it could have been.
