Charlie Hailey

On his book Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space

Cover Interview of September 01, 2009

In a nutshell

Camps are unavoidable functions of our contemporary moment, registering local and global forces at their earliest stages and thus signaling trend, crisis, and identity. These malleable spaces conform to our desires but might equally be constrained or manipulated by external forces. Some camp to escape, while others set up camp to approximate return to a home that is inaccessible or does not exist, still others are forced to camp. This functional range is unprecedented.

Protestors. Artists. Boondockers. Dreamers. Survivalists. Hackers. Detainees. Refugees…. The book covers a lot of ground – from festival camps to disaster relief camps to man camps. I have sought to make sense out of this vast network of provisional and semi-permanent sites with a guide that affords opportunities to “see” situations that are far and near, fleeting and fixed. The book design underscores this immediacy and utility with open binding and simple paper stock, recalling both tourist handbook and military manual.

I have also sought to tell the story of camps – their full range of experiences and conditions and the forces that shape them. Each type of camp becomes a story within larger global narratives of autonomy, control, and necessity – categories that correspond to the book’s three parts. “Autonomy” focuses on camps of choice, “control” investigates camps regulated by structures of power, and “necessity” explores transient spaces of relief and assistance.

At one level, this story can be read cover-to-cover as a continuous, though not necessarily linear–chronological, narrative. Or, a reader may choose to sample different cases – which one might traverse through the book’s cross-referenced structure – to find his or her own way through this contemporary camping life.

architecture / urbanism / design / migration / nixon richard / rwanda / camps / mobility / calvino italo / agamben giorgio /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009