States of Exception: Coordinates of Possibility
States of Exception: Coordinates of Possibility, 2025
Video with sound, duration 7 minutes
Video editing and sound: George Lazoglou
Production: kilowArt International Productions
Courtesy of Klitsa Antoniou and Diatopos Art Center
States of Exception: Coordinates of Possibility
States of Exception is a 7 minute video installation that unfolds within a suspended landscape of function and meaning. Filmed in an abandoned airport, the work situates the viewer in a site once designed for regulation, movement, and control, now emptied of purpose yet charged with residual authority. Architectural elements such as runway signs, towers, and markings persist as silent witnesses to a system that no longer operates but continues to shape perception and behavior.
Within this environment, the performer moves through repetitive, codified gestures derived from orientation and signaling systems. These actions no longer direct or instruct; instead, they are rendered inoperative, transforming into quiet, ritualized movements without destination. In this sense, the work engages with Giorgio Agamben’s notion of inoperativity, where function is not destroyed but suspended, opening it to new uses and meanings beyond its original purpose.
The video constructs a state of exception in which normal rules are suspended and time appears to hover rather than progress. Stillness and repetition replace efficiency and flow, revealing the fragility of structures that govern order and security. Disorientation emerges not as failure but as a condition that sharpens perception, exposing the instability of reference points and the vulnerability embedded within systems of control.
By stripping function from its original purpose, States of Exception opens a space of potential in which pause becomes a form of resistance and uncertainty becomes a mode of awareness. The work invites viewers to inhabit a threshold between law and collapse, motion and inertia, where meaning is continuously renegotiated and where the suspension of function reveals the possibility of thinking and experiencing otherwise.
