MAR/MÆR’s performance BEDROCK : : ROCKBED invites audiences into Mustikkamaa’s rocky and sandy landscapes to experience a work that emerges from a desire to disappear fully, melt into the surroundings, and become one with the site.
Relax and observe
Our Camouflage Strategy begins from deep attraction to the space, its stones, trees, tiles, mosses, molds, algaes, lichens, lichens, lichens. It makes us want to be alike, let our bodies dissolve, mix them into the space, fully. This is a phenomenon which some animals master, such as certain insects, chameleons and cuttlefishes. The anomaly relation, the confusion between bodies and space is the very slippage where the imagination aroused by camouflage is the most intense.
The camouflaged creature is a silent trickster which creates ambiguity in visual perception. One cannot tell the reason for the hiding: is it a defense or is it a lure? The creature’s mission is to conceal and disappear, and by doing so, evoke histories of a site through its material specificity.
On this surface lies (a) horizontal adhering, growing, porous thing(s).
MAR/MÆR have researched Camouflage Strategies in a row of performance actions since 2017 in public spaces. The first was created by the Lapeyrouse Cemetery wall in Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, and the latest one in Søndermarken park in collaboration with oak trees, lichen and BLOOM festival of nature and science. The seventh volume of their Camouflage Strategies is being made at Mustikkamaa, Helsinki.
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