TRANSLOCAL: Camp in my tent, 1996 -2004

A relatively simple project by the Greek-American artist Jenny Marketou, exploring different local realities through the repetition of an identical act (setting up a tent) in public spaces around the world.




Translocal 2004, installation view at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art Thessaloniki, Greece.
The exhibition is part of Cultural Olympiad, 2004

The idea of migration, unhominess, inbetweeness and not belonging represents our biggest fears and our biggest fantasies and desires The experience of setting up or leaving home is among the events and experiences that people remember. The events which took place during each of my intervention s distinctly influenced place consciousness and fostered the importance of a gendered public space in our culture.

Conceiving Translocal: Camp in my Tent I have been inspired by my experience camping out with nomad Bedouins between 1994 and 1996 in the Desert Negev in Israel as well as reflecting upon the contradictions and complexities of our daily life lived in a highly technological and decentralized society where our preoccupation with dwelling, identity and embodiment have been always negotiable.and are in continuous state of transformations.

Translocal/Camp in my Tent is a series of public interventions with my tent which started in 1996 and continue till 2001. I pitched my tent in cities where public place has cultural memory in contrast to the cities where the public space is structured and conditioned by the flows of tourisms. Each intervention result in a lot of agitation of the public space and was mediated through a series of linguistic confrontations, discussions, exchanges of hospitality, controversies between myself and the locals and sometimes the police.

While I was setting up the tent in Central park in New York City I was spotted by the surveillance helicopters and the park police enforced me to take it down immediately and I had to pay fine for using the public space .In Rotterdam while I was setting up my tent in the park where the prostitutes make their daily exchanges I was forced and harassed by the pimps and prostitutes to take down my tent because i was harming their business . Fortunately the local police saved me and helped me to set up my tent on the police boat in the citys harbor. In Ramallah, Palestine people were extremely friendly but as a single woman setting up a tent it was conceived as an act of prostituting myself and very soon a long queue of male spectators lined out side my tent.