Camp/Anti-Camp is a 3-day festival taking place in Berlin this week, which seeks to include new perspectives and take a critical look at the practice and the discourse of camp. Performers, scholars, musicians and artists from three continents will challenge, embody or even ignore the prevalent discourse.
With its origins in queer culture’s playful disregard of dominant value systems, camp eventually became a relatively established if difficult to pin down term in popular theories and academic scholarship. Typically reduced to the idea that something is good because it’s so bad, the term camp has, ironically, become estranged from the richness of the queer practices it had initially described. The programme introduces “anti-camp” both to draw attention to cultural practices and traditions that are mis- or underrepresented in camp discourse and to recalibrate the concept of camp by confronting it with seemingly unrelated practices.
Following Mae West’s credo that “too much is not enough,” the festival offers nothing but highlights, including an intimate evening with queer icon and Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn and a concert-event by the sexually-transgressive cult performer Kembra Pfahler with her band “The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black.” Representing a younger, more contamporary strand of campy perfromcances are the young mysterious club act Narcissister and the notorious Austrian artist-duo Jakob Lena Knebl/Hans Scheirl. Moreover the festival will feature presentations by international scholars such as Douglas Crimp, Diedrich Diederichsen, Elizabeth Lebovici, José Muñoz and Juliane Rebentisch, and by artists such as Bruce LaBruce and Richard Move.
One special highlight of the festival will be a section on tropicamp, curated by scholar Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz. Tropicamp, a term coined by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica after his exposure to the work of American underground artist Jack Smith and Superstar Mario Montez, opens up an internationalist critique of North American camp culture.
And if that’s still not enough for you, every evening the award-winning homo-core queen Vaginal Davis will bring festival guests and figures from Berlin’s cultural scene together for her talk-show performance “Vaginal Davis is Speaking from the Diaphragm.”
Camp/Anti-Camp: A Queer Guide to Everyday Life Curated by Susanne Sachsse and Marc Siegel. HAU 2 Theater, April 19-21, 2012. Festival Pass: 40€/20€