"Growing up in New York and Beirut after 9/11, the concept of a state of emergency, or state of exception, became normal for us; but it was usually understood temporally, marking a period of time where the rule of law was suspended. As visual artists we became interested in how this concept manifested spatially, as places within a particular democracy where citizenship was challenged or deferred. In the United States and Lebanon, this was in American Indian reservations and Palestinian refugee camps. These are spaces where the outsides and excesses of the nation-state are clearest, where Indigenous and refugee communities force us to confront the meaning of democratic governance and the distinct reality of the metropolitan spaces where we grew up and lived. In both cases, these spaces were the results of settler colonialism.

Giorgio Agamben’s work on both the state of exception and refugeehood was a beginning for us, but our project was to expand his concepts towards indigeneity, and using a multimedia documentary practice. Agamben speaks of areas of life that exist in the gray zone at the end of law, which for him is the beginning of politics. It is at this edge, just outside the visible norms, that we can observe where the political becomes enshrined in law, and this is what we were looking for in Spaces of Exception. It’s only at the limits of Lebanon—the literal and metaphorical borderlands of Lebanese sovereignty and identity—where the camps can exist, and where we can observe the divisions and contradictions that create and sustain the nation. And it’s the same with the Indian reservations in the United States."