Uneven Ground Part 1 Project 2024 Astrid Kim Norwich University of the Arts Norwich | UK Uneven Ground is a speculative project for a detainee centre on the island of Orford Ness, in Suffolk. The project is an uncompromising socio-political critique of a crypto state apparatus that dehumanizes groups of people to justify oppressive control and pursue ethnic purity. When confronted with “other” bodies the state’s reflex is to regulate, surveil, and dominate. This systematic dehumanization of people facilitates their treatment as military pawns rather than human beings. Is this dystopia or reality?Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben* has observed that in Ancient Greek two different words were used to refer to what we call ‘life’: zoe, the biological fact of life, and bios, the form or manner in which life is lived. For Agamben the loss of this distinction obscures the fact that in a political context, ‘life’ refers more or less exclusively to the biological dimension (zoe) and implies no guarantees about the quality of the life lived. ‘Bare life’ gives priority to the biological fact rather than the way a life is lived and can be lived; ‘life’ is thus stripped of its possibilities and potentialities. Tutor(s) George Themistokleous