arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

The summer camp planned for july 2001 is being postponed till next year. We've come to the conclusion that doing the camp this year is not feasible for us. At the moment, we are not enough people to really do a good job. Plus, we would like the organizing group to be more divers. That's why we want to give the project more time. Therefore we have decided to now work towards a "conference" from the 17.-20. of january 02 in bremen. Basically we are trying to realize the same goals the camp was supposed to realize, a "conference" is just "one size smaller", that is, there's less organizational hassle and meeting at a "conference" for three days asks for less of a commitment than camping together for ten days.
If this "conference" is a success, we can plan an antiracist antisexist... summer camp for 2002. We'd consider the conference a success especially if is instrumental in bringing together a sufficiently "mixed" group to subsequently organize the summercamp.

The next interregional meetings of the project are on the 18./19./20. of may in Berlin and from the 1. to the 4. of june in Bremen (Germany).

Antiracist antisexist summercamp project – “manifesto”:

What we want:
Our starting point is the conviction that the different relations of power and domination are inseparably bound up with one another, permeating and stabilizing each other. We want to develop a practice that reflects this. Our aim is to contribute to the construction of a new constellation of political tendencies.
A “new constellation” would be one where, finally, antisexist positions would not have to be fought through by women/lesbians against the passive resistance of the majority anymore, but be a matter of course; and where, finally, men would, of their own accord, become active in the field of antisexist politics.
We want an end to the dominance of a heterosexual culture within the radical left, for which gays are good for adding color and entertainment to the serious business of politics, in which lesbians are nearly invisible and for which intersexual and transgendered people are, at the most, objects of scientific curiosity.
Such a new constellation would be one where the presence of migrant and jewish people, people of color….(no matter where they’ve grown up) would be a matter of course; where the manners and the language of the majority would not constitute the norm and where white antiracists would deal with their own racisms instead of only speaking for and about the “oppressed”.
Last but not least, we want an alliance that would make it as difficult as possible for people from the middle classes to assert what they take for granted, feel to be normal or are interested in as the norm - that which is generally taken for granted, experienced as normal or seen as interesting.

Who we are:
Many of us know each other from radical left circles in Germany. Most of us have a German passport, not all of us are “white”. We have different “sexual orienations”, the ratio of “men”/men to “women”/women fluctuates around 50:50. There are also differences concerning our social background and our current “class position”.

How we organize:
Since august 2000 we have been meeting every month, in different locations; up to now only in Germany, (soon) possibly also in Poland, the Netherlands or whatever place we are invited to.
We are open to the idea of a separate but coordinated organization of migrants/people of color within the project network; we are just as open to any other kind of closer cooperation.
That women/lesbians in the project can organize separately also goes without saying.
In our concrete political practice, we attempt to bridge the differences between us. And despite the fact that we are not yet as divers as we would like to be, we’ve got plenty of work on our hands already.
How we treat each other is an important issue, we think, and we definitely want something other than the activist-macho posturing so familiar to us from our experience in many left circles. We must hasten to add that this is not the only type of male dominance – or dominance of any kind – that we see as a problem. We are not so naïve to think we’ve found “the answer” to this; that is to say, we are open to new ideas and ways of dealing with one another.

What is it going to be about?
Because we start from the assumption that all relations of power and domination are intimately bound up with one another and therefore always already refer back to each other, we are striving for a great diversity in the issues addressed. For us, this means dealing with sexism, antisemitism, heterosexism, nationalism, class exploitation and racism, among other issues. We think it’s essential to draw structural links between different relations of power and domination, or aspects of these relations, from the very beginning. For example, by bringing the intrinsic interrelatedness of masculinity, heterosexism and whiteness into focus. Which ones of the countless possible interconnections we will focus on at the camp crucially depends on your input. What all these catchwords refer to - in our understanding - is simply impossible to unfold in a short text such as this one. But we intend to put together a kind of reader with different types of texts.
We don’t want the summercamp to be a kind of “field-and-meadow-university”! We want there to be offensive actions as well as discussion groups and we are planning a larger action in the context of the camp. We intend to give different thematic headings to the days of the camp.

Identity politics?!?
We want one of the major focuses of the camp to be theories and practices of identity and identity politics. Just as there are different constructions of identity, there are different politics of identity. That is why we distinguish “essentialist” politics of identity, which, in most cases, aim to gain or retain privileges or come to an arrangement with the given social conditions, from “strategic” politics of identity that function to sabotage relations of power and domination. By essentialist identity politics we mean politics that derive a common identity from a shared essence, for example, being female (understood as a “natural fact”). By strategic identity politics we mean politics that understand common identity pragmatically, as a constructed reality, as, for example, many women’s/lesbian groups do. We don’t want to reduce the complex discussions around identity politics to this distinction, though.
At the summercamp, strategic identity politics will be a major issue. Within this problematic, the question that concerns us most is if and how it is possible to create political alliances across major differences of experience. Finding this out is first and foremost a social question. The question of whether it is possible to bridge differences - bound up with relations of power and domination – in thinking, physicality, feeling and acting only gets answered in actual encounters: Is it possible to establish a truly respectful and equitable way of dealing with one another (which requires a lot of sensitivity for different experiences, realities and vulnerabilities) or not?

Camp Culture?!?
We hope the summercamp will be a venue for performances (film, music, acrobatics, for example), subversive culture and cultural subversion. Not just because it’s fun – which would be reason enough – but because we see culture as a space in which society, in many different ways, some fraught with conflict, (re)produces its stocks of knowledge, its norms and values, its structures of thought and feeling. Radical resistance, therefore, must under no cicumstances neglect cultural space and should not fail to engage in its own cultural production – that the dominant modes of seeing, hearing and feeling may be subverted!

By now at the very latest, some will say that our program is definitely not realizable. We agree with this assessment insofar as we don’t assume at all we will be able to realize everything we envision at the first summercamp already. We understand our undertaking to be a long-term project requiring some staying power, ample capacity to tolerate frustration and great persistence. Up to now, though, it’s been fun, too.

We hope for lively transnational radical participation in the camp,
see you

The organizers

The minutes of our meetings are accessible on our web site in different languages. We can also send them to you by post, if you wish.
The address of our web site is: http://www.summercamp.squat.net. If you have access to the net, take a look at it, you’ll find information there, the invitation in various languages and so on.
Our e-mail address is: summercamp@squat.net.
Please address regular mail to: summercamp c/o A6-Laden, Adalbertstrasse 6, 10999 Berlin, Germany.