Mimesis can take many different forms, spanning from music to our own perception of reality, but in all cases it involves a duplication of sounds or images in an attempt to recreate and represent what we have sensed from our surrounding. Mimesis can be both a conscious act (painting an object) or an unconscious act (creating a replica of our environment to understand it and remember it). As Taussig defines it, it is “the idea of imitation” and throughout his book Mimesis and Alterity he describes the mimesis of cultures, particularly how the Cuna begin to take on and imitate the characteristics of the foreign cultures they have encountered.

The image above is a painting done by Diego Gravinese, an Argentinian artist who focuses on imitating real life as best as possible through ‘photographic’ paintings. In this painting, he has taken a picture of a man and a woman standing in front of a previous painting he had made and, from this photograph, he painted another picture thus creating a ‘painting within a painting’; an imitation of an imitation.