CAMEL COLLECTIVE
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC), 2020This online exhibition, a nine-minute video essay titled Gated Commune, 2018, is an unsettling sendup of modernist problem-solving that befits our dystopian moment. Over grainy black-and-white footage of insects, polluted landscapes, and melting icecaps, a female voice-over flatly recounts the attempts of two camps—“the futurists” and the “neo-primitivists,” stand-ins for the avant-garde as a whole—to organize cities that seemingly invoke Situationist concepts like psychogeography and unitary urbanism, or others that could be closer to Yves Klein’s zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility. “Gated Commune” itself was inspired by the urban planning of the developing Danish city of Ørestad, “an apparently serene site haunted by social, environmental, and historical divisions,” as put by Anthony Graves, who formed Camel Collective with the late Carla Herrera-Prats in 2010.