…the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency… has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones.

 Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. 2

On 23rd March 2020 Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a Covid-19 lockdown across the UK, it would last for over 100 days. At once, London became a city without people heavily policed and surveilled. Iustitium/State of Exception questions the suspension of law in a time of crisis. We chart a journey through the dystopic landscape of lockdown London to propose a new form of engagement with you, our online audience. You are part of a dislocated group about to experience this work from a laptop somewhere else, but in the same moment. We are together apart. We ask you to experience the work actively, to follow our instructions. 

A city with no people is one that feels on the edge of a sort of death. The weird post-modern plazas of the financial district reveal themselves as classical forms ready to decay, as they are left without purpose. Statues of empire stand alone in the golden dying light of an empty city. This void, the lack of frenetic energy, as consumers and workers are kept at home: Stay at Home, Save Lives, Protect the NHS. A desolate emptiness around the Bank of England in morning rush hour is broken only by the distant sound of sirens. The shop windows of New Bond Street are stripped of luxury goods as the economy falters and collapses without the speed of constant movement.

Against the backdrop of this empty chaos, the government rushed through the Coronavirus Act 2020, a bill that introduced emergency powers – a radical suspension of the basic rights of the citizen, including the right to protest. After almost 100 days of lockdown the Black Lives Matter protests erupted onto the streets, an outpouring of humanity, solidarity, and emotion, banned by the Home Secretary. The surveillant gaze of the police helicopter logged all of this, the empty and the full. 

This is evidence of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s so-called state of exception in action. A public health emergency caused by a global pandemic has created a moment when governments can argue for a radical suspension of basic rights of the citizen. In the UK we have been told: do not gather, do not stop to rest, do not socialise outside of your household, this is enforced by a heavy police presence and a ramping up of surveillance networks. Edward Snowden describes this as ‘the moment of transmissible fear’, it is a moment of vulnerability where rationality goes out of the window and our genuine concern of physical safety in the present, erodes our future liberties.[1] 

In the UK we have seen temporary emergency measures introduced at various moments in our constitutional history, perhaps most notably in the context of the Northern Irish conflict. Shifts to the surveillance powers of the State act alongside these radical changes written into our legal constitution. As a result of the IRA bombing campaign of the City of London in the 1990s a vehicular based system of control and surveillance – the Ring of Steel – remains in use 25 years later. This is the same landscape that Iustitium/State of Exception takes you to again in the lockdown of 2020, the city once more transformed through emergency powers. 

Are you here with me?

Central to the work is a figure portrayed through the machine vision of a thermal imaging camera, similar to those used aboard the police helicopter. The heat of our bod­ies is now a key indicator of viral infection, the surveillant gaze inextricably bound to the heat sensor. A woman glows white with the warmth of her body, trapped within her domestic environment. She will issue a set of instructions to you the viewer, please follow these to join with others across digital space, think about your own corporeality. 

A hyper-real sonic landscape intensifies the effect and should be listened to with headphones - these are the defining sounds of London’s lockdown.  The birdsong of a never-ending Sunday morning echoes through deserted streets, but the continuous waves of distant sirens and the incessant drone of circling helicopters tell a different story of curtailed freedoms and watchful eyes. This din of police helicopters has been sampled, de-constructed and reconstructed.

Think about the trade we are being offered, our liberty for our safety. Perhaps in our desire to stay well and healthy we are creating another sort of illness, one that won’t be solved by a vaccine. This surge in surveillance and blocking of protest is Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception in action, a moment of transmissible fear that allows governments to argue for a radical suspension of basic rights of the citizen: the plague victim is encased, surveilled, controlled and cured through a complex web of dispositives that divide and individualize and in so doing articulate the efficiency of control and power.[2]

Iustitium/State of Exception is a portrait of a city in lockdown, and as it emerges in protest in the final moments. Masked faces. Warm bodies moving together. In 1940, reflecting on the collapse of the Weimar Republic, Walter Benjamin wrote: the state of exception in which we live is not the exception but the rule.[3] As the helicopters thrum, and we see each other’s bodies as the threat, we need to feel concern and to remember this moment. Let us fight against the state of exception becoming the rule.

[1] Snowden, Edward. System Update with Glen Greenwald. The Intercept, 8th April 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd7exbDzU1c

[2] Agamben, Giorgio, quoted in Boano, Camillo. The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism. 2017.

[3] Benjamin, Walter. Theses on the Philosophy of History. 1940.