Artists: Susanne Kudielka and Kaspar Wimberley

Urban camping inhabits disused empty spaces that can be found squatting between adjacent urban structures. These openings, alleyways, corridors and niches are temporarily occupied by custom made or deconstructed tents, which slot into the spaces provided, bridging, framing or upstaging the architecture.

Urban camping considers our relationship to, and the relationships between, the built and natural environment. The tents are suggestive of an escape into the countryside or wilderness, while simultaneously moulding themselves into the physical characteristics of the city. It is an image that seems playfully out of place. It disrupts the balance of the city with contradictions and tilted juxtapositions. Can the city be viewed as a natural landscape?

The tent, as a temporary form of accommodation/structure, is characterised by its speed of construction (and deconstruction). What is the permanence of the city? Is escapism a temporary excursion? What are we escaping from/to?

For the ARENA Festival in Erlangen participants were given a map of ‘camping sites’ to be found in the city, a set of instructions and a camping kit (sleeping bag, toothbrush, camping stove, etc) to take on their journey. Other members of the public experience the installation as an unexpected intervention.

Urban Camping at the ARENA Festival in Erlangen – Evaluation (old website)
Urban Camping at the ARENA Festival in Erlangen – A diary and some postcards (old website)
Urban Camping at the ARENA Festival in Erlangen – The camping kits (old website)

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About

Susanne Kudielka and Kaspar Wimberley work internationally as interventionists and performance researchers specialising in site-specific and site-responsive art, alternative strategies for audience interaction and new forms of artistic collaboration.

The artistic process usually begins with a given site, and a process of observation and dialogue that analyses, and eventually responds, to the architectural, socio-political, geographical, mythological, connotative and historical narratives that can be found there.

Projects are quietly subversive, playfully readjusting the narrative and appreciation of a particular activity or a given site. The working process often involves those that live in an area, and aims to be accessible and relevant.

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