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| Time of residency | May 2025 |
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| Contact info | brogaard.camilla@gmail.com |
| Definition of artistic practice? | Camilla Brogaard (she/her) is a Danish performance artist, philosopher (MA), writer and somatic practitioner based in Berlin. Her work and research emphasizes collaboration and traverses text, choreography, and social organizing. Committed to a trajectory of relationship-building, she treats joint attention/action as both research material, artistic method, and a strategy for care-fullness. Camilla is a co-founding member of the project space Studio KG (Berlin), and she works actively as a performer, choreographer and facilitator in Berlin and abroad. |
| Title of the investigation at the residency | Groundwater: on the distribution of (dis)comfort |
| Description of investigations and findings | At BIRCA, I initiated a collaboration with groundwater; specifically, groundwater as a metaphor for—and method to examine—the unseen reservoirs of discomfort that sustain the western comfort economy. I was questioning how comfort is produced, not as a natural or individual state, but as a cumulative process shaped by histories of environmental imbalance and acts of consumption. I was particularly interested in researching/creating a collaborative performance score inspired by the processes of groundwater; its slow filtration, accumulation, and continuous extraction. This score—equally a group reading and community action—was shaped and kept alive by contributions from multiple bodies and their voices, mirroring the porous, stratified nature of BIRCA’s groundwater sites. |
| What are you most curious about or invested in in your own practice? | Currently, my work orientates around experiences of mild discomfort, e.g. boredom, impatience, or confrontation; not as passive encounters but as active negotiations of attention and ignorance. Whilst acknowledging my own situatedness within the western “comfort economy”, my work grapples with the (performative) conditions for social stability and seeks to reposition discomfort as both a resource and a burden; a bodily experience that requires urgent civic and political redistribution. |
| What questions did you bring to investigate and what questions are you leaving with? | 1) What does it mean to collaborate with an environment, not as a backdrop, but as an agentive participant? 2) How can discomfort function as both a boundary and a bridge in collective experiences? 3) How can a performance score become a living, adaptive framework for community engagement, reflecting the vulnerability and relational qualities of both human and non-human systems? |
| Transformative, creative moments at the residency | During my time at BIRCA, I ended up collaborating and exchanging closely with the artist Oliver Sale. We established a very generous/generative practice of collaborative writing––and facilitation through text––which ended up being an orientation point for our process-sharing at the end of the residency. |
| Keywords for the work done at the residency | Activism, Collaboration, Community organizing, Groundwater, Reading |
| Research locations | White Space (BIRCA) |
| Further documentation | Texts_BIRCA_Camilla Brogaard |
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| Webside links |
Camilla Brogaard
