Photo: Eline Bjerkan
THERE IS A GATHERING HERE
by MAR/MÆR
performance action and installation
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a giant
holobiont
so big
you see it everywhere
covers like fabric
any stone
any bark
any soil
a giant
circular
so intelligent
you see it everywhere
because without it
there is no seeing
no moving
no touching
giant
superorganism
so many
and we were always that
that many
never one
always many
never one
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“THERE IS A GATHERING HERE” is a CAMOUFLAGE ACTION by MAR/MÆR that invites audiences to wonder of the multiple micro-organisms living and thriving at Søndermarken oak trees. In this performance particular beauty of lichen existing in symbiosis with hundred to four hundred years old oak trees challenges human way of languaging dialogue in non-subjective manner. By moving in the space of in-betweenness, lichen is queering the given concepts of dead and alive.
Performance by and with: MAR/MÆR (Mari Pitkänen, Kaja Mærk Egeberg)
Created for: BLOOM Festival of Nature and Science in Copenhagen in May 2025
Installation: developed in collaboration with and build by Marianne Femerling. Outside eye: Tobias Shaw Petersen
Supported by: Kulturdirektoratet/ Arts and Culture Norway, Frame Finland and Det Obelske Familiefond.
Photos by: Eline Bjerkan & Malthe Ivarsson / Bloom
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Our Camouflage Strategy starts from yearning to belong and to fit in into ‘something’, and continues into material action when the desire to assimilate to a space is great. The attraction to the environment makes us want to be alike, and let our bodies dissolve, mix into the space. This is a phenomenon that 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.
Camouflaged creature is a silent trickster in a space that 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 materiality and specificity. Camouflaged bodies are invoking unheard songs and stories that materials in surroundings resonate.
The creature disappears into the landscape and plants a mystery. What is hidden is a mystery. Yet, on the other hand the hiding itself reveals that there is something that needs to be hidden. Creatureness is invoked by the ambiguous slippages between human and other-than-human bodies.
Photo: Eline Bjerkan
MAR/MÆR have researched Camouflage Strategies in a row of performance actions since 2017 in different cities and festivals. The first was created by Lapeyrouse Cemetery Wall in Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago Carnival in collaboration with Lordstreet Theatre Company, and the latest one was presented at Nonstop International Theatre Festival in Moss/Norway in October 2023. The sixth volume of this work shall was created in Søndermarken in collaboration with oak trees, lichen and Bloom festival.
Camouflage performance series began from a desire to find a strategy to transcend the borders of humans' and non-humans' experience and perception of space, by the means of performance. Our practice is embedded in post-human and feminist practices and deals with evoking in-betweenness and creatureness. Our current interest lies in spaces where fungi, particularly lichen, is prominent. This is our way of reaching out to being-with, thinking-with and performing-with an organism for further learnings on complications of symbiosis.
Photo: Eline Bjerkan
Photo: Malthe Ivarsson / Bloom
Photo: Eline Bjerkan
Other camouflage work by MAR/MÆR