Paradigms of Participation Wim Delvoye and Wafaa Bilal's Tattooing Performances

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Notes

¹ La Piel Que Habito [The Skin ILive In] is the title of Pedro Almodovar's new movie starring Antonio Banderas and Elena Anya. As the Spanish director explains in an interview: ‘[T]he title of the film refers to a character whose skin has been created in a laboratory. The skin defines our identity, our race, or so it was until not very long ago.’ Almodovar adds: ‘[T]he film reflects about this, and identity and its possible changes and manipulations’ (EMPIRE 2011: 39).

² Michel Foucault started to articulate the concept of biopower in ‘Right of death and power over life’, the brief but dense conclusive chapter of his La Volonté de Savoir [The Will to Knowledge] published in French in 1976 and translated into English in 1978. While biopower is the application and impact of political power on all aspects of human life, biopolitics is the style of government that regulates any given population through biopower.

³ Throughout his work, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has investigated the invasiveness of biopolitical power and the object over which this power is performed, by developing Foucault's reasoning on biopolitics, governmentality and biopower, particularly in the trilogy dedicated to the figure of homo sacer (Agamben 1998, 1999b, 2005a). Borrowing the concept of homo sacer from ‘an archaic Roman law’, Agamben explains that it is according to this particular legislation that the juridical specificity of homo sacer needs to be sought. In particular, he argues that it concerns the coexistence of ‘the unpunishability of his killing and the ban on his sacrifice’. Such a paradoxical juridical stance positions the creaturely life of homo sacer ‘at the intersection of a capacity to be killed and yet not sacrificed, outside both human and divine law’ (Agamben 1998: 73).

⁴ Wim Delvoye's Cloaca was first presented at Antwerp's MuHKA in 2000. Since then it has been changed and perfected, ‘now totalling eight machines, hundreds of drawings, scale models, stereoscopic photographs, X-rays, as well as bonds and derivative objects, not forgetting the excrement produced by the machines themselves, delivered vacuum packed for collectors to snap up’ (Delvoye 2008: 2).

⁵ As Bilal's website states: ‘Bilal suffered repression under Saddam Hussein's regime and fled Iraq in 1991, during the first Gulf War. After two years in refugee camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, he came to the U.S. where he graduated from the University of New Mexico and then obtained an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2008 City Lights published “Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun”, about Bilal's life and the Domestic Tension project’, (http://wafaabilal.com/html/bio.html).

⁶ It is in the 1679 writ habeas corpus ad subjiciendum – you will have to have a body to show – that Agamben sees the foundation of the intertwining of democracy and spectacle.