Castrametation is a term of Latin origin which, in military terminology, means the art of camping, i.e. the temporary or permanent organisation of space for the purposes of offensive or defensive warfare. Although the “art” of warfare is often considered one of man’s higher mental activities, involving techniques such as the assessment of complex data, forecasting and the mental evaluation of one’s opponent, in fact many of its elements date back to evolutionary eras when the human was an integral and equal part of the animal continuum. Castrametation is one of the best examples of this, as it draws most of its strategies from the methods animals use for hunting and survival: ambush, camouflage, nesting, deception. Moreover, it seems that the dwelling techniques of early humans derive primarily from imitating the sheltering mechanisms of non-human animals, many of which survive – without our realising it – in a large number of human activities, such as the organisation of the city, practices of daily life, artistic expression and, of course, military life. 

Panos Sklavenitis’s work Castrametation is a large-scale installation from which a multitude of elements hang that help us to understand the animal origin of temporary military camps and their equivalent in the modern era. The installation has a strong totemic character, recalling pre-modern beliefs and cultic rituals from times and cultural environments that recognised and honoured the interdependence of human and non-human life. It is accompanied by an artist’s book that documents Sklavenitis’s research, and serves as a key to decoding the multi-layered composition.