Bare Life

Video documentary of a performance concerning the commercial transformation of a formerly neglected area of Athens that had been a home for immigrants and mainly internal immigrants: mostly turkish and pomak speaking people from Thrace.
The performer is an architect activist who has worked in the area with her group called "nomadic architecture".
The video starts with a "hip-hop" version of a text by Aristotle (politics 1) referring to language as that which differentiates human beings from other animals.

The performance was based on a text by Giorgio Agamben.

Agamben is a proponent of thought and writing against the systemic forces of science and technology. For Agamben a political life is aimed at the one thing that makes us human -- the fact that happiness is always at stake in our living -- essential to our form-of-life as humans. For Agamben life can never be separated from its form-of-life but this is precisely what political power attempts to do today as what Agamben terms "pseudo-scientific" ideology has invented the term "biological life" as the secularized term for "naked life." Naked life, for Agamben is now the dominant form of life everywhere because political power has succeeded in founding itself on a separation of naked life from "form-of-life".

As he wrote over two decades ago:

...what kind of state would be capable of dissuading and annihilating all terrorism in the bud...? It would have to arm itself with such terrorism and generalize terror on every level. If this is the price of security, is everybody deep down dreaming of this?

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• Agamben
• naked
• life
• Gazi
• Keramikos
• Athens
• Greece
• Aristotle
• terrorism
• security