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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?
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