Means without End: Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri's Camp Campaign

Abstract

OCTOBER 126, Fall 2008, pp. 69–90. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “How is it that a camp like Guantanamo Bay can exist in our time?” With this question Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri initiated Camp Campaign, a recent process-intense investigation of a political issue that continues to be urgent today—nearly eight years after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, which precipitated the opening of the detention center on the United States naval base in Cuba in 2002. The many different iterations of their project—including an exploratory road trip across the US; several videos, a Super-8 film, and a slide show, which formed part of a gallery exhibition at New York’s Art in General in early 2007; and an active Web site containing a variety of political texts and archived podcasts (www.campcampaign.info)—indicate the expansiveness of their approach to this vexing question. Not surprisingly, their “campaign”—a term diverted here from its political or military associations—soon spiraled into multiple questions concerning human rights, constitutional protections for the stateless, and viable modes of political contestation currently available within artistic practice. Anastas and Gabri included these and other questions in their detailed map of the US that charts the journey they took from New York to Los Angeles during July and August, 2006: “What is the legal status of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay? Who is the subject of human rights? What is the status of a human being who has been stripped of any legal standing or any political rights? How to open up this discussion to a wider public and to do so in all of its complexities?” Thus was Camp Campaign directed first of all toward provoking discussion, a central vehicle for Anastas and Gabri, who have collaborated since 1999. Since then they have also been active organizers at 16Beaver, a space initiated “to create and maintain an ongoing platform for the presentation, production, and discussion of a variety of artistic/cultural/economic/political projects.”1 As an