Zona - Karol Nepelski
Not so long in our country, an area was designated where people were stripped of their rights. In the Zona, people are outside their citizenship and outside the nation. The agreement about its establishment has made any lawfulness difficult to imagine in this country. The long shadow of the Zona is cast over social justic and efficiently numbs us.
The sounds of the Zona come from an illegal source. Pushed out, pushed through, and pushed back, these sounds are pushed away from audibility. Unheard, unaccepted, without a right to exist, which in itself could also be illegal.
Don’t worry, there is nothing to hear here: you don’t need to listen. Although the work is essentially pleasant.
And if we did it the other way?
... We could look to Europe not as an impossible “Europe of nations,” whose catastrophic results can already be perceived in the short term, but as an aterritorial or extraterritorial space in which all the residents of the European states (citizens and noncitizens) would be in a position of exodus or refuge, and the status of European would mean the citizen’s being-in-exodus (obviously also immobile). The European space would this represent an unbridgeable gap between birth and nation, in which the old concept of people (which, as is well known, is always a minority) could again find a political sense by decisively opposing the concept of nation (which until now has unduly usurped it).
Giorgio Agamben, We Refugees, trans. Michael Rocke
Karol Nepelski