description - overview
CAMP.LAB 1 - July 28th until August 05 th
Camp Lab 1 applies itself from July 28th to August 05th through
presentations, talks and film screenings to the development of this
archive and the lexicon. To represent the transitory and procedural
aspects that correspond to the emergence of the camp as well as to
the activist and performative patterns that echo it, every day is ruled
by the motto of a dual, self-contradictory activity.
"A group of teenagers devotes itself to a fanatical Jesus cult and stays
in a mass camp on Ibiza to collect the garbage left by tourists as an
action of penance ("Kreuz & Quer", July 11th 2006: Gott segne
Ibiza/God bless Ibiza); A Turkish baby, born in Austria and child of
Turks who live in Austria, is to be deported to Turkey due to failing
to meet a deadline and has to apply from there for the residence permit
for Austria (Der Standard, July 14th 2006, p.11); Israeli and
Palestinian teenagers are brought face to face with the traumatic life
stories of each other while staying in a "Peace Camp", getting the
chance to establish communication between them and initiate
self-awareness (Der Standard, July 18th 2006, p. 6); a "training camp
for financial support for arts and culture" helps to "formulate
projects in a consistent and cogent way" and stages a meeting of a
selection committee to put the projects to the test using the help of
experts on the field of "project management" (IGFreieTheater, email
newsletter 6/ February 2006).
How would a research project have
to look like that didnt compare those stories about camps as
experimental, dangerous, forced, healing stays but would plough trough
the area that creates them?
In the form of a laboratory for nine days the CAMP-LAB 1 assembled
guests from different disciplines (journalism, architecture, art,
social theory, theatre etc.) to outline a navigation system for the
perceptibility of the camp not as a determined architectonic form or a
juridical institution, but as a situational and emergent complex of
contemporary society.
Every social formation, where people are cut off their usual
surroundings to live temporarily in a dangerous and unstable condition,
appears as a camp where problems concerning every rule of living
together and every trait of individuality may arise. The camp is a
place of both excessive regimentation of logistic processes and
uncertain negotiations, a place of therapy and compulsion, of temporary
stay and unlimited waiting. Still, those examples are not comparable
with each other. As a condition difficult to decipher and being in a
permanent change regarding singular alienation from oneself and the
environment, the "Camp" denies the logic of event and principle and
demands an equally changing archive of individual analysis, which in
turn is linked with a wider notional body of developmental conditions
of current "Camps". Within that lexicon you will find notions like
fear, asylum, stopping, discipline, enclosing, stronghold, initiation,
migration, bare life, slum, vacuum and many others....."
contributions by (in alphabetic order):
Fahim
Amir, Bernhard Cella, Ulrich Beckefeld, Claudia Bosse, Karl
Bruckschwaiger, Fred Büchl, Volker Gessendorfer, Silvia Santangelo
Jura, Herbert Langthaler, Tomislav Medak, Corinna Milborn, Aldo
Milhonic, Lukas Pusch, Florian Schneider, Chris Standfest, Martin
Wassermaier, u.a.
and
Thomas J. Jelinek, Alexander Nikolic, Katherina Zakravsky
in Fluc: Tunnel to Riesenrad. Gabor Steiner Weg, Praterstaße / 1020 Vienna;
inJedinstvo: Kultur- und Sportverein; Praterstraße 9 / 1020 Vienna;
in the labfactory: Praterstraße 42/1/3 / 1020 Vienna.
A cooperation of: nomad-theatre, Fluc, EU-eroticunion, Akademie d. bild.
Künste Wien, MASKA (Ljubljana), Willem de Kooning Academy / Rotterdam,
Büro f. ungewöhnliche Massnahmen / Stuttgart and further partners
daily program
July 28th The laboratory starts with the motto Opening
up Being Taken by Storm with the presentation of Corinna Milborns
book Gestürmte Festung Europa( Fortress Europe Taken by Storm),
linked with the urging and current discourse about Europes sealing-off
from the migration flows setting out from the southern hemisphere
(examples: Ceuta and Melilla).
As a token of opening up,
Silvia Santangelo Juras documentary about a vocational training
project for girls in one of the biggest favelas in Rio de Janeiro
answers to the taking of Europe by storm.
July, 29thThe
second day with the maxim Provoking Reconstructing presents Volker
Gessendorfers urbanistic field trip to Beirut, a hybrid and
multicultural city that imperilled for decades has again received
public attention within the last few days as a city besieged. In
combination with that, Fahim Amir (social theoretician, teaching in
Vienna) reflects upon migrant pop-intelligence, using the example of
Kanack Attack. This shows that the camp, appearing often as a
mechanism of being isolated by others and isolating oneself, is after
all in conflict with the urban and media space described by Giorgio
Agamben in a topologically intertwined way as an included exclusion.
August 02ndAfter
a few days of intra-laboratory conditions, Camp Lab 1 is reopened for
public on August 2nd under the heading Relocating Detaining. The
historian Karl Bruckschwaiger, the ethnologist and publicist Herbert
Langthaler (Asylum Coordination Austria) and the artist Alexander
Nikolic deal with the broad and contradictory range of European-African
relations. The confrontation of the rich with the poor is to be seen in
Slum TV, an art project by Alexander Nikolic and Lukas Pusch. It
shows an artistic intervention in a slum in Nairobi and relates to the
slum as the place of organising survival between proud and violence.
Life in the slums is a counter-model to the setting out for Europe that
has to deal with the juridical contortions of the old conception of
asylum as a protective area. People have to fight for residence, but
on a totally different field. The day is concluded according to the
Fluc by an annotated presentation of African music, rounded off with
stories.
August 03rdActing Being Governed is
the maxim that opens up the wide ethic-political array to a new
discourse, where the camp is made a scene of biopolitics by Michel
Foucault and Giorgio Agamben.
In two controversies the biopolitical
spectrum is focused first on its individual, ethical and praxeological
aspects, to be then connected with more political and biotechnological
questions. Overlaps are however also bound to occur for the theoretical
part.
To start with, Chris Standfest (actress and performance
artist of the Theaterkombinat with a pedagogical background and a
current research activity in the field of space studies) and Katherina
Zakravsky (theorist of culture and performance artist) tackle the
difficult topic of a self-chosen discipline as a self-technique for
especially artistic and other biographies under precarious
circumstances. As we know, Michel Foucault had tried to develop a
topical technique of existence out of antique wisdom theories of
self-care.
Is that an ahistorical aberration? Or will there be
astonishing disciplinary and extraordinary alliances due to the lack
of self-technique for post-industrial nomads, migrants and virtuosos
(Paolo Virno)? Biographic reminiscences about the way of taking up
residence by seizing buildings in Berlin Kreuzberg (Standfest)
intertwine with questions about ritual and compulsion neurosis as
antipodes of self-education.
Subsequently, Fahim Amir poses the
contentious issue of the approaching gene-colonialism, answered by
Tomislav Medak (theoretician, performance artist and activist from
Zagreb) with a reflection upon the social complexity of biopolitics as
a mode of production (in English).
August 04thStaging
Condesing involves the intersection of the camp with public space.
Martin Wassermaier presents a short film about the occupation of
Karlsplatz by a media-camp. As an active platform within an independent
cultural approach and practice of media, the media-camp wanted to make
the Karlsplatz central point of a new protest movement. For some
theatrical-performative projects that started to stage camp-like
patterns in Vienna last winter, Staging Condesing gives the
opportunity to present and evaluate not only those projects in a
retrospective way such as the urbanistic choreographic Palais
Donaustadt by the Theaterkombinat with included theory-camp and In
deinem Lager ist Österreich (In Your Camp is Austria), a project
about Marianne Fritz by the Stadttheater Wien (Vienna City Theatre)
and the pedagogical relic of the Childs City. In addition to that,
Claudia Bosse (Theaterkombinat), Fred Büchel (Stadttheater Wien/ Vienna
City Theatre) and the architect Ulrich Beckefeld (office for
subversive architecture osa), who has a working cooperation with
Büchel, show the process of their works. It reaches from besiegement
a project about Melvilles Barthleby in Hebbeltheater HAU, Berlin 2004
to camping on the Danube ledge (Bosse) and leads then away from the
camp to manoeuvre, a mass-reading of Marianne Fritz novel Naturgemäß
I (Naturally I), which exceeds 1000 pages. Büchel and Beckefeld
compile a visual installation of pocket-camps that comprise
miniatures of stills and microarchitecture. This field of attention is
joined by Ilse Chlans film about the pedagogical experiment of
Childs City, where children were offered a more or less isolated
camp for a first practise in urban social behaviour in the spirit of
the seventies.
August 05thStarting already at 3
pm, the Camp Lab finally deals with both Closing and Beginning. On
the one hand, the camp is a scene of closure, enclosure and
sealing-off, demanding its opening according to Georges Didi-Huberman
which writes its own story to become perceivable and representable.
On the other hand, the camp is a starting point for unexpected
processes, due to the lack of an accurate prediction about what can
happen within an artificial atmosphere, as Ute Meta-Bauer diagnoses.
She initiated the research project Curating in a cultural vacuum at
the Academy of Fine Arts. This project meets with the Slovenian
sociologist Aldo Mihonic, who talks (in English) about the scope of art
and activism on the basis of ex-Yugoslavian and other examples. This is
more than the closing of a circle: Not only derived the first idea for
the >camp-project< from the periphery of the performance-magazine
Maska(Ljubljana), where Mihonic is a constant columnist, but the
vacuum brings up again the question of the construction of camps,
which is often connected with the anxiety of wars and conflicts. If the
camp, as a product of war, is structurally speaking a cultural vacuum,
as it organises only mechanisms of bare life after the breakdown of
infrastructure, then it can become a resource for art, since it makes
for combinations of ethnic groups, activities and approaches that have
been impossible so far. But if artistic work all too easily allies
itself with the chic of bare life as a so to say politically upgraded
form of the Arte Povera, naked cynicism threatens. The ever so desired
combination of art and activism has to move within these dialectics,
wherever it pitches up camps. This is shown by the subsequent film
Holiday Camp (Jennifer Lyons-Reid, Carl Kuddell) that deals with the
ambivalent impacts arising from a campaign of liberation at the
deportation camp in Woomera (Australia).
CAMP Lab 1 is the first station of the continued researching process of the CAMP-Project.
The
results are also going to be documented on the website and put up for
discussion. Other single projects will follow in autumn.
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