Interview with MAR/MÆR
We interviewed the performance art duo MAR/MÆR, formed by Mari Pitkänen and Kaja Mærk Egeberg. Their site-sensitive performance BEDROCK : : ROCKBED takes place on Mustikkamaa from 13–16 August.
Kuva: MAR/MÆR
Mad House: BEDROCK : : ROCKBED is the seventh volume of your Camouflage Strategies. The series has evolved from the Lapeyrouse Cemetery wall in Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago Carnival to collaborating with oak trees and lichen in Søndermarken, and now to Mustikkamaa’s cliffy and sandy areas.
What has this series taught you about resilience, and what have you learned through your collaboration with the Mustikamaa lichen about symbiosis?
MAR/MÆR: Our Camouflage Strategies came from being interested in finding strategies of disappearing and to transform as part of the surroundings as a performative action. Through our work with living systems such as trees and lichen, resilience has expanded its meaning.
Lichen reminded us that resilience is rarely an individual achievement. A lichen itself could be looked at as collaboration, or claimed to be more of a verb than a noun, more like a meeting of multiple agents than one unit of a species. To grasp this on a deep level as a human being is an intriguing and destabilizing project, since the feeling of being a singular subject for us is very evident. A symbiosis between different organisms that survive through interdependence rather than autonomy, through porous ways of meeting.
Lichen taught us that resilience is slow, ongoing, almost invisible wriggling in living species. Lichen grows through attachment and adherence, through ongoing exchange. Some lichens grow only a millimeter a year, some more. The outcome of the growth might not be the most extravagant expression in floral life, but rather grey and modest. Lichen can grow almost everywhere and loves dead matter. And as it is living it creates new soil or organic matter for other plants to grow in. The porosity of lichen allows it to dry for long times, to wait for more humidity, and then start acting again. We know that lichen was sent to open space for research purposes, and returned back to the planet earth, living and still able to photosynthesize. So it survived the ride and if you think about it, lichen does look sort of an alien being.
MH: You describe the camouflaged creature as a "silent trickster" where one cannot tell if the hiding is defense or lure. When you camouflage into a space, what do you hope for the audience to experience?
MAR/MÆR: We hope to create a gentle disturbance in something familiar. A moment of enchantment or estrangement, where perception shifts and an invitation to lean into more-than-human relations is open and malleable.
We wish audiences to slow down. Our performances are usually quite slow in its shifts and movements. It is an invitation for audiences to dive into some sort of deep listening. We invite to linger or dwell and to give focus to relations we surround ourselves with without necessarily noticing. We hope that audiences perceive the performers as well as other movements in the landscape.
Part of the work is to meet the restrictions of our bodies and our perception. We work with sound too, to be able to speak to the senses. But if we manage to camouflage well enough, we might be able to reveal to audiences, for a very short moment, how their visual perception and perhaps memory is not to be fully trusted, and that beyond this perception there is a whole world and other reality which does not always match with the perception we are able to fabricate. Our sensory organs are developed in a certain way, and feed into a certain understanding of that what is.
Also the humour of the work lies in the restrictions too: the camouflage action is always bound to fail, as we also want to be found and seen in our attempt of wanting to be fully hidden.
MH: The work sits at the intersection of post-human and feminist practices, exploring "in-betweenness and creatureness."
Why is the act of disappearing—of refusing to be a distinct, separate body— an important gesture in your work?
MAR/MÆR: Disappearing allows us to move away from the idea of the body as separate and self-contained. We are interested in what emerges when boundaries soften, when the body becomes part of a larger ecology of relations, materials and forces. In that sense, disappearance is less an escape than an opening.
Working with camouflage in Moss in 2023, both of us were pregnant. The process of embodiment was really symbiosis in action. That time it took us to research the phases of early pregnancy. In the process of implantation the blastocyst is actually first touching the wall of the uterus, and a chemical reaction starts to happen. The blastocyst is sort of disappearing into the wall of the womb, and the womb’s surface sort of embraces and swallows it in, we like to think. And from thereon the embryo creates its own space to grow within the wall. Suppose the action of disappearing is a cellular urge in many living creatures.
