FWC - FIRST WORLD CAMP

The objective of the FWC platform is artistic research in the demilitarisation of isolated communities. FWC research is focusing on refugee camps, military bases, gated communities and other modes of capsularity.

Since the publication of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer and particularly its English translation, we are witnessing an ongoing debate on the notion of “bare life”. The debate, which has been situated in the context of law and juridical questions, became a political debate par excellence in the field of human rights and biopolitics. Speaking in simple biopolitical terms, “bare life” refers to the body’s mere “vegetative” being, separated from the particular qualities, the social and historical attributes that constitute individual subjectivity.

Agamben analyzes the notion of “bare life” in a concentration camp, showing us that the camp is actually a biopolitical paradigm for the contemporary West. The camp is a state of exception, a state of emergency upon which the entire political and legal system of the First World is built. The camp is always a parallel system, literally a 'para'-system, an exterritorialized site, where the usual legal system does not apply. And yet, exactly as such, it is a place or even a non-place which the regular legal system can turn to any time.

The question derived is: can a concept of a "camp" serve as a role model for any kind of capsularity we are looking at?