A two-day performance work which is an iteration of Camilla's ongoing thesis that goes by the working title The winding work of knowledge. In the thesis, she follows university students' exploratory sketching with a particular interest in how materialities and spatialities can be seen as co-creators in the process. Together with the philosophical reasoning of, among others, Karen Barad, Gilles Deleuze and Èdouard Glissant, she approaches the educational contexts and the actions that are created with them as asymmetrical and fleeting interactions.
Deleuze follows in his work The fold Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's philosophy and highlights there the repeated occurrence of the baroque folds and how they are not only significant for the era Leibniz lived in but also find their way to other times and places. How it becomes an ontology. A philosophy of the iterative becoming of everything through folding. The fold is also described as a figure for how all kinds of oppositions such as inside/outside and body/soul are in fact inseparable aspects of the same whole. Camilla's thesis moves in such an immanent ontological philosophy and wants to challenge the sharp division between art and science in our time. For her, performance is to follow and understand, to investigate by doing, to do science.
"The fold as an image, action and movement to think with and through has become very significant for my dissertation's methodology."
Previous works that have been iterated within the thesis work are The explicit (2023) The implicit (2023) The last wilderness of knowledge (2023) as well The curvature (2024)
Camilla Johansson Bäcklund (b.1976) has a Master's in liberal arts from HDK-Valand and a philosophy master's degree in Education with a focus on image. Since the fall of 2019, she has been doing her doctorate at the University of Gothenburg's Center for Educational Sciences and Teacher Research (CUL) in the subject Aesthetic forms of expression. The roles and approaches that artistic work, teaching and research entail often move as a tangled unity in her work. Camilla lives and works in Svenshögen where, together with some other artists, she also runs the free art scene Stationen. She also works as a teacher at the Faculty of Arts, University of Gothenburg.