treason, treachery, terrorism and torture

This work, part of the laws project, explores the relationship between the law and violence and people's experience of contemporary sovereignty. By documenting people's confrontation with texts and traces of this relationship the work hopes to open up the possibilities of subjecting law to deconstruction through conceptual art practices.

the laws project

Examining how the law is deployed as a moral signifier of good and evil demarcating those to be eliminated and those to be lauded is not only necessary for our understanding, but perhaps our survival.

What are these things called laws that constrain us? How are they created, destroyed, recreated? Who do they define and restrain? Who do they set free? How can we delve into the origins of law and reveal this matrix of violence and power? What Derrida calls an "economy of violence".[i]

The laws project seeks to examine these questions through the use of video, performance and documentation.

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No where is the real character of law revealed more then in the historical and contemporary delineation of dissidents and out-laws. The daily mediation of fear, often called the war on terrorism, is only the latest convergence of law, violence and the construction of spaces simultaneously outside but subject to the rule of law and the violence of right.

It is worth repeating Walter Benjamin^s warning at the height of European fascism that, "[t]he tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule.[ii] That at its core the law creates zones of indifference that allow the founding violence of sovereignty to direct its gaze quite literally on (and perhaps in and through) the bodies of those in its view.[iii]

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[i] Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, Chicago:

University of Chicago, 1978 pp.146-47

[ii] Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History,

Spring, 1940

[iii] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare

Life, Meridian Stanford, California.

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Damien Lawson + Kylie Wilkinson

damien.lawson@aph.gov.au

kylie@myspinach.org