Camouflage
Imagina Festival
100 square meters camouflage net, nylon thread
San Javier, 2008
In the project Camouflage, I covered the tool shed of the Almansa Park in San Javier with a camouflage net.
The net covered the shed with the aim to make it go unnoticed in the park setting, and also to make it similar to the park's natural vegetation.
The idea is that this shed should cheat the surrounding nature, to have an advantage and try not to be found and destroyed. This work deals with the opposition between what man has built and the natural world, referring to the ancient struggle between order and chaos.
Parks could be considered as human creations, they turn out to be artificial creations attempting to imitate the natural environment: they are a kind of domesticated and tidy nature, with auxiliary components (such as benches, fountains, paths...) that make them more comfortable and more liable to be visited. In a sense, these human traces keep a precarious balance with nature’s normal course.
Without a group of people in charge of the park maintenance (maintaining it as it is desired to be, that is, liable to be visited), nature would claim its place, gradually taking over everything, like in the story of Julio
Cortázar "House Taken Over": a shrub rooted in a crack, a seed on the roof of the shed, a bee setting up a beehive, mosquitoes, rats, birds... and the return to the wild, to Nature.
Since these days the only way to enjoy green spaces consists of going to parks and gardens, the camouflage net becomes a necessary prosthesis that fills the view of the natural environment in the Almansa Park. And so, the shed slips unnoticed from building traces and its maintenance.
Al least, this work deals with reality and appearance. We might wonder if green spaces are no more than camouflage for urban life or, on the contrary, the town camouflages the original natural scenery, buried under the foundations.
