Adamot: Land without Earth and Corporeal Memory: A Conceptual Theft of the Border and Civic Performance Art.

The paired projects Land without Earth and Corporeal Memory (1999-2000) took place along the Israeli-Lebanese and Israeli-Syrian border zones and focused on border lines, territory, border crossing and corporeal memory. Juxtaposing the situation of body and land, when both are affected and damaged by a state of emergency, Civic Performance Art process concentrated on ways of making present the absence - of stolen earth and of amputated body parts. At stake in the projects was a representation of exposure, an essential part of a state of emergency, as something which becomes visible through the invisible, the lack or disappearance of what had been once a whole, a body. The discussion reappraises Agamben's concepts of 'state of emergency', 'homo sacer' and 'sovereign power' in the local context of bio-political entities in the Middle East, and takes these notions into the dramatised and material reality of land and body via the Hebrew-based triad 'blood-man-earth' (dam-adam-adama). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]