curated by Lavanderia a Vapore and Workspace Ricerca X
From November 27th to 29th 2026, Research Camping returns for its fifth edition, transforming the spaces of Lavanderia a Vapore aisle, from the foyer to the theater, into hybrid spaces between fiction and reality, serving as devices for the exchange and dissemination of artistic research processes.
WHAT IS RESEARCH CAMPING
During Research Camping, research moves from an intimate, closed-door space to an imaginative public square for new politics – a middle ground hosting alternative postures, thoughts, and imaginaries that generate shifts in perspective. The Camping not only hosts research but constitutes a form of research in itself, oriented towards imagining social and political alternatives, new ways of being together, and modes of existence, thanks to the activating potential that artistic practices unfold and awaken.
What happens to research when it goes public, and what exchanges and benefits does it draw from this? What is the public role of research? In a world increasingly seeking other possible horizons, can research act upon those who encounter it, enabling new visions alongside plastic and imaginative capacities?
In a time obsessed with the shimmer of the new – and not always innovative – product, coupled with rapid planned obsolescence, research offers space for unexpected responses that often layer and revitalize materials and memories through circular, associative, and unpredictable logics. How does research observe and welcome transformation? How can it allow us to experience and imagine transitions of state, in both a physical and political sense? Through the public sharing of individual practices, research spills over and becomes choral, giving life to landscapes that are both visionary and experiential, opening up an uncommon shared space.
SHIFTING BODIES
How does our way of being together change when we lose certain reference points?
How do we stand on the threshold of a space-time?
What ignites in the interstices?
What happens to bodies when they let go of the need to define everything?
What do we see when the light changes? And how?
What torsions and tensions manifest in an ever-changing body?
Research Camping 2026 explores the transition of state as a bodily and spatio-temporal condition. By challenging sharp focus and the linear principle of cause and effect, we disrupt worlds and celebrate smoky, liminal, and blurred atmospheres.
Shifting bodies welcomes transformation and transition as a perpetual state, rather than an intermediate passage towards a reassuring destination.
We explore the threshold and the liminal state to open portals into a new morphology of matter: fluid, broken, vulnerable. Liminal temporalities, sunsets, and frosts that blur past and present in an atmospheric vibration. Thresholds of transformation where bodies sublimate into new forms or seep beyond their own margins. From molecular excitations that crack given bonds to boilings that configure unexpected relationships.
Research Camping is a changing world in which bodies are allowed to experiment with discomposed postures, tensions and torsions that converge in a field of possibility. In a shifting, smoky condition, gaze turns upward or towards other directions. Orientation breaks open toward vast horizons, towards places that allow potential to explode in unexpected directions and new articulations.
If we consider the condition of transition as a perpetual state, what sensory, critical and physical reconfigurations become possible? What new forms can be welcomed?
The environments of this edition embodying these dynamics are the parking lot and the observatory: thresholds that inform bodies and postures, inviting us to rethink how to situate ourselves in space and share practices and materials within the Camping’s choral dimension. Through the sharing of research practices and materials, these environments will be activated by the temporary community of artist-researchers, participants, and visitors inhabiting them.
WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR
We invite artists/researchers to send articulate proposals starting from their own research path, resonating with the questions of this edition and the Research Camping dimension.
We invite proposals that not only or not necessarily explore the key words of the call thematically, but that experiment with them in a direct way with attitudes, methods and postures.
Proposal formats can be:
- research practices, as proposals to be shared with a group of people who practice and/or observe
- multimodal research materials, as pieces of the research process (sounds, words, images, texts, objects…), to be organised in the space to be traversed by the participants, also as an installation.
Proposals can be placed in one of the Camping spaces:
- THE PARKING LOT
A space of apparent calm, an area of pause, interruption and kinetic and spatio-temporal suspension, the parking lot is simultaneously a place of perpetual motion and constant reconfiguration. Whether underground or surface-level, unauthorized or neatly partitioned, it is a liminal zone where one stands on the verge of going elsewhere. It is a place of continuous interchange, yet so expanded as to seem anonymous – a non-place where it is easy to get lost or collide due to an anarchic spilling beyond given geometric perimeters. A limbo that exists only in relation to other places, a pre-place, a gateway to other spaces: a stopover towards other directions, a place where one never fully stops because one inevitably moves on. A place that flirts with research, ironically named a parking lot but lived as a zone of immersion rather than stagnation.
How do we inhabit a state of pause? What does it mean to pause in a place designed as a functional layover to go elsewhere? What happens if the layover becomes a perpetual state, stripped of its original function?
THE OBSERVATORY
A moor, an unbounded promontory, a site of lunar vertigo from which to spot sidereal horizons, a place of tension where space multiplies and the body engages in radical stretching. The observatory is a place to unhinge the capacities of vision, perception, and imagination; one spots, looks upwards, reaches elsewhere; eyes and senses attune, becoming small observation instruments. Amplifying and increasing, the observatory is thus a multiplier of worlds, an opportunity to question the known horizon. Space joins time: one imagines the future while spotting the past that, through the speed of light, composes the sky we observe right now.
How do we train to imagine another time? How do we venture towards the beyond?
All proposals must have a maximum duration of 30 minutes and be compatible with the rotation and cohabitation of the other proposals: the sharing of space and time is a curatorial and organisational principle of Camping, understood as a collective and shared experience.
WHAT WE OFFER
Participants will receive a lump sum of €300 if resident/domiciled in Turin and within a 50km distance, or €500 if resident at a greater distance.
It is required to be in possession of an individual VAT number or the possibility to be supported by associations or organisations that can issue an invoice.
Selected artists are invited to participate in all Research Camping days.
HOW TO APPLY
To submit your proposal, please fill out this FORM no later than September 10th.
Results will be communicated via email and published on the website www.lavanderiaavapore.eu by September 30st.
For info and questions, contact Anna Estdahl / Lavanderia a Vapore: estdahl@lavanderiaavapore.eu (active until July 31 and from September 01).
