Camoutopia examines the ways in which silkscreen printing and social
engagement mutually inform one another to create complex experiences and enact
social change. Camouflage functions as a visual metaphor for social intersections I
am facilitating, through shared interests in queer aesthetics, collective experience,
and embodied exchange. In its failure at representing nature, camouflage calls into
question what we consider natural, and in the tension between passing and
dazzling, acts as a queer aesthetic. The silkscreen printing process, overlapping
layers of color, creates areas of pronounced intensity, a lens and framework
through which to view things differently. This phenomenon extends to social
dynamics; the unanticipated and intense happens in the intersection, what Manning
terms engendering, a process of becoming rather than being. I apply a pedagogical
approach to print production and social events, after Helguera and Bishop, and
draw from Muñoz’s theoretical framework of world making and futurity, giving
form to Federici’s feminist reconstruction of the commons.

• http://www.marymacktremonte.org/