Spatial Displacement

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Space, in the context of the so-called ‘war on terror’ has taken on an unmistakable, dark existence – that of Black Sites, and camps of displacement.  The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1998) claimed the existence of ‘camps’ reveals something fundamental about contemporary life and the power exercised by the modern State over people.  We can see how his ideas are easily transferable to multiple camps and states of existence, especially if one wants to understand the most notorious of them all, Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.  According to Agamben, the propensity to banish and dehumanise, like a spectre, keeps returning in the form of camps:  the ‘hidden matrix’ of violence and repression of our age.

This project takes Giorgio Agamben’s notion of a ‘hidden matrix’, something latent within, from which something new originates, develops and takes form, and transfers the notion into an aesthetic concept of Concrete Constructivism and Minimalism Art.  In this project  the basic Guantánamo prison cell size 2.4 x 2.4 x 1.8 metres is drawn out in a grid of colour shapes. Then, the grid of colour form is displaced and manipulated producing new shapes and forms. Following traditional notions of Concrete /Minimalism Art, and through computer manipulation, this work becomes divorced from realism, the figurative and source.  The image refers only to itself:  no other meaning than itself and its self is a matrix of 2.4 x 2.4 x.1.8.