Hopefully you have a great time with everyone else here. Help us make this camp a safe and beautiful place for everyone. Should you observe or even experience transgressive or assaultive situations yourself, you will always get support from us! Talk to us - we are the awareness team with the pink marker.
Awareness means to be aware, to be informed, to be sensitized for certain problems. We understand awareness structures not as symptom treatment, but as a structure that holds up a mirror, that encourages discussion and argument - until we know how we can and want to live together. Awareness can support to draw attention to discrimination and discriminatory structures, can stimulate us to empower or to reflect. Climate change and the accompanying social and ecological crises cannot be separated from a society based on exploitation, compulsion to compete, oppression and exclusion of people. Even in self-organized political groups that work critically of domination, we are not free of certain mechanisms and can unconsciously reproduce discrimination.
That's why we have an awareness concept again this year, so that we can get one step closer to our utopias and learn how to design spaces where everyone feels comfortable. We want retreat spaces where we can put plasters on our wounds. To then stand up again together, to stand up for each other, to have fun, to form gangs, to make noise and to confront this shit!
The working principles of the awareness crew of KuloKo and the climate camp in the Rhineland 2021 consist of several building blocks:
Two tools are fundamental to our support work.
second, our political stance, which includes an attempt at an intersectional and multidimensional perspective. For us, this means that we try to critically question our own positioning and that of all those involved and include them in the analysis of the situation. Since in cases of rape and sexualized violence, non-consensuality cannot be discerned by outsiders or through political analysis, an exclusive power of definition is non-negotiable. We work with partiality. Partiality means for us to support the (affected) person and to stand by him/her in the further process. By offering support work, we want to open spaces in which people are listened to without questioning the "correctness" of their experiences. Being able to define for oneself what has been experienced is an important moment of empowerment and reflection and should become the norm anyway! We do not work with sanctioning power. A person thus defines what happened, but not what will happen. Being able to identify and formulate needs and desires is an important step and also part of our process. Our hope is that all wishes and expectations can be realized. However, it may happen that wishes and possible demands cannot automatically be fulfilled and implemented.
"We are not hypersensitive, but critical of power! We want to dismantle hierarchies and we don't want:
There will be marked smoking areas. We would like to see smoking only in these places as well. If that is not possible, just ask if it is okay with the people around you. Alcohol is consumed where it is served. Please be generally mindful of the people around you and what consumption they are comfortable with. We would like people to be sensitive to drug use of any form and be aware that public use can be retraumatizing for others and can lead to social exclusion. Be aware and have fun :)
