| What roles do objects and gestures play in rites we perform in culture and how are they part of the production of identities? Can we reclaim and re-appropriate existing forms that have shaped and fixed the social roles we perform? Susan Sontag wrote that “to perceive camp in objects and persons is to understand Being as playing a role.” “Camp” can be both a quality of any cultural product or person and a certain kind of sensibility—a way of perceiving the world as a stage and being as playing a role as well as the love of the exaggerated and artificial. I am interested in the notion of fluidity in “Being” per se, as well as the continuous flirtation with the different territories camp occupies. | 
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Julia Prezewowsky is a Berlin-based artist.
Julia Prezewowsky, CAMPing Dresden. Courtesy of the artist.What roles do objects and gestures play in rites we perform in culture and how are they part of the production of identities? Can we reclaim and re-appropriate existing forms that have shaped and fixed the social roles we perform? Susan Sontag wrote that “to perceive camp in objects and persons is to understand Being as playing a role.” “Camp” can be both a quality of any cultural product or person and a certain kind of sensibility—a way of perceiving the world as a stage and being as playing a role as well as the love of the exaggerated and artificial. I am interested in the notion of fluidity in “Being” per se, as well as the continuous flirtation with the different territories camp occupies. I perceive politics, power, architecture, and gender—everything belonging to the realm of the serious, the static, the taken-for-granted—as something performing, an act allows for a whole new variety of propositions.
I am concerned with breaking down prevalent binaries such as: the real and the artificial, masculinity and femininity, high culture and popular culture. I use tools like wonder, myth, gossip, and flirtation as sources of inspiration for conducting my work. There is often an event-based feeling to the final outcome, where performers, objects, and rituals as equally potent material to stage opulent scenarios. I accumulate and pile up heavy symbolism drawing from pop culture, marital rituals, kitsch and queer aesthetics, and either invent or borrow ritualistic actions that are then performed repeatedly throughout the event. Playing with the subject/object dynamic, viewers have often been forced to become part of the constructed nonsense narratives in the installations and are made complicit in the creation of meaning. The scenarios are highly contrived yet seek to evade linear interpretations.
