Presentation of the research group of the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna Moderation: Alexander Nikolic
Starting 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).
