From governmentality to solidarity: George Drivas’ Laboratory of Dilemmas

Abstract

In the context of current trends in contemporary art on migration, this article undertakes a close analysis of George Drivas’ installation Laboratory of Dilemmas (2017). It delineates the response this work offers to dominant discourses of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ and explores how contemporary art can intervene critically in these discourses. In Laboratory of Dilemmas, Drivas articulates an audio-visual narrative in which the dilemma of accepting or rejecting the ‘foreign(er)’ is played out in two distinct registers: that of a biology experiment allegedly conducted in the 1960s and that of a millennia-old literary text, Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women. The analysis of the installation will answer the following questions: How do the themes of governmentality, biopolitics and hospitality come into play? In what ways does the artwork undermine the established ‘foreign’/‘native’ dichotomy and how does it foster a space of potentiality between incoming and local populations? Looking at the exemplary biopolitical setting of the artwork and taking stock of existing interpretations, I propose an alternative reading that sees the work overturning the governmentality paradigm in favour of a profoundly inclusive and relational perspective.