Structure

[camp!] is conceived as an international and interdisciplinary cooperative platform

for the analysis of the morphology of contemporary camp phenomena and

their basic socio-political processes from the perspectives of art, science/research and activism.

The process is roughly structured in four sections:

– research (including documentation and discourse in different media)

– laboratory

– performance and other artistic productions – publication.

The basic activity consists in an ongoing research process gathering and organising information on the field of camps and camp-like phenomena of the present and representing the results of research on websites, magazines, in conferences and laboratories and other events of public character.

The collaboration of disciplines and persons from different cultural backgrounds is intensified by an exchange program involving physical travelling and

artistic productions of project members based on particular field trips to European and Non-European locations.

The process of gathering information and supporting camp-related

projects in a network structure leads to intensified working periods of both closed and public character in several locations called “camp labs”.

Background

The contemporary social phenomenon of the camp as temporary stay, as a system of inclusion and exclusion, as logistic organisation of anonymous groups, as a legalistic system for the management of migration and asylum regulations, as a situation of both therapy and alienation, all in all as a symptom for radical cultural changes concerning identity, citizenship and residency call for a collaboration at least on a European, furthermore also on an even more international level.

Goals

The next step of the process will to a large degree consist in the artistic articulation of the ongoing research process in the format of performance and installation. Output from other sections of the platform such as film and video productions, website information, lectures etc. will be integrated in the artistic production but also go on independently. The process will be closed by the production of several magazines.

These formats are supposed to make clear that the camp is our very own site of experience and transition, not something that happens to others we as socially aware artist and theorists have to liberate (sometimes in a quite patronising way). And these others are already part of “us” and our experience of “campifying” our civic and private life.

The overall goal of the project is the enforcement of a new European public concerning the camp as a broad phenomenon of political and cultural impact through a transdisciplinary and transmedia architecture of information and the creation of artistic form.