N A T U R A L S E T T I N G

 

“Natural Setting”, Cella+Knoll, c-prints, 4x5 negatives, 60x48”, 20 images.

We begin with the provisional assumption that wheeled travelers fall quite neatly into two mutually exclusive categories: Roadtrippers and Campers. Roadtrippers experience their sojourns virtually through the mediating frame of the windshield, safe within a metaphoric (and largely illusory) bubble of interiority. They are akin to the subjects of cinema. Campers yearn for the nitty gritty details of contact. They position themselves on the front lines, negotiating locality and globality. Camping for the photographers Klaus Knoll and Cella constitutes what Gilles Deleuze might have called a ‘happy deterritorialization’. — Claire Daigle

ENCOUNTERS with nature, nostalgia, escape, peace and quite, solitude or community, cheap accommodations, mobility or home base, survival skill testing and a chance to see how other people build, structure and make home. Everyone is on stage, everyone is watching. Romans turn their living rooms inside out for the summer, carting furniture and televisions to a more rural setting, like a parking spot next to a body of water, for the sake of cool breezes and card games. In Apulia campers walk around in white terry cloth bathrobes, order in pizza and hang around the ubiquitous espresso bar. Campers in Chablis return to the same spot each year for a community they don’t feel they have at home. Germans sport the latest and most efficient gear and never camp the same place twice. In Montfiascone a couple, both with children, performed a pre-nuptial dress rehearsal, several loners in Lago Trasimeno who seemed to enjoy a certain distant company return annually  to their deeded summer sites and a couple tent-camped across Europe on a Harley. We’re interested in how mobile and temporary architecture creates new possibilities, modes of being and ways to get to know, and know of, each other.