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| Zygouri Mary Biotechnologies of power and crisis of the spectacle Mary Zygouri conceives an imaginary structure taking full advantage of the element of plausibility. She invents the historical biography of the pioneer, noble and cosmopolitan Dimitrios Zalouchos so as to collect information regarding his supposed innovative activity in the field of raising poultry and his contribution in the science of ornithology. The results of Zaloucho’s investigations take the form of an exemplary structure for poultry fattening, while the presentation of designs strengthens the reality effect, as it records the various stages of the process since the first idea and the successive solutions which were rejected, in order to choose the most functional and aesthetically satisfying one. The fattening cells constitute a visual equivalence of the structural methods (control, classification, hierarchy, education, surveillance) liable to contemporary governing methods that guarantee docility and controlled development based on predetermined principles. It is an ideal model for the aesthetization of the technologies of bio-politics, a contemporary utopian paradigm of a Benthamian Panopticon, where ‘every cell is a small theatre where the actor remains alone –according to Foucault’s concept- and transparent’. Placing the spectator in the marginal position of the utmost confined, allows the incessant function of the surveillance system, and at the same time places the spectator within the relevant framework as an organic part of the structure, achieving the ultimate efficiency and faculty of penetrating human behaviour. At the same time the work functions as an allusion to the crisis noted regarding the credibility of the institutions of parliamentary representation (apparent is the recall of the architecture of the roman senate or the chamber of parliamentary meetings). The element of the ‘spectacular’ noted in the contemporary political institutions where every one of us participates, either as a producer or as a consumer of the spectacle, unavoidably leads to the thought that the safeguarding of the imperturbable function of power presupposes the maintenance of the enclosed in a condition of permanent visibility, taking into consideration that the cell can be the host to every one of us. Syrago Tsiara  Download CV |  The Fattening Cells, 2007 |
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