Camouflaged Screams -

Immersive and Scenographic Constructions of Wilding
 

In Wild Things: the Disorder of Desire (2020), Jack Halberstam posits the notion of wildness as an index of “exclusion, a place of exile (…) simultaneously a chaotic force of nature, the outside of categorization, unrestrained forms of embodiment, the refusal to submit to social regulation, loss of control, the un-predictable.” [1]

Following Halberstam’s sense of wildness as a critical term, and wilding as a performative, with Camouflaged Screams Laura Acosta and Santiago Tavera’s latest immersive installation - part of a recurring narrative in their collaborative artworks that is deeply informed by their own personal and lived experiences as Canadian-Colombian immigrants - invites us to engage with aesthetics of camouflage to provoke critical reflection upon the processes by which humans adapt to their changing environments and deeply entangled survival with the epoch of the Anthropocene, planetary events, and ongoing ecological disasters.

Performance scholar Laura Levin, draws attention to camouflage not merely as a tactic for making oneself invisible, but rather as a process of “blending into the background” and as a potential site for political activism. [2] The political and critical remit of “background” in Camouflaged Screams, brings consciousness to the presence of bodies in more or less natural urban landscapes, rather than concealing or masking them; camouflage becoming a performative aesthetic from which to negotiate and adapt one’s ecological relationship to (un)natural environments. The use of large-scale panoramic video projections renders the camouflaged bodies as visible textile sculptures, but also as highly “performative body-object-events” [3] that simultaneously carry their own agency, temporality, and socioenvironmental meanings; transforming the ubiquitous white cube into a “space of pleasurable belwilderment [4]” and an environmentally charged scenographic construct.

With the use of motion sensors, the projected digital landscapes become an interface between the camouflaged bodies and viewers, inviting us to become intra-active participants and performers in constructing our own virtual relationship with narratives of “camouflage consciousness” [5] and wider body-socioenvironmental justice issues.


Author: Shauna Janssen

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1. Jack Halbertsam, “Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire.” Duke University Press, 2020: 3.
2. Laura Levin, “Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In.” Palgrave MacMillan, 2014.
3. Dorita Hannah, “Alarming the Heart : Costume as performative body-object-event.” Intellect Scene vol. 2, no. 1 and 2, 2014.
4. Halberstam, 10.
5. Levin, 170.