O sprawczości martwych ciał
On the Agency of Dead Bodies

Summary/Abstract: The article analyses one of the projects of the Center for Political Beauty – The Dead Are Coming (2015). This operation was a direct response to the disgraceful practices of storing the dead bodies of refugees in plastic garbage bags in a Sicilian hospital and to burial procedures for forced migrants that were deviating from the minimum standards. The collective exhumed the mass grave, carried out the identification of the corpses, and then transported the two dead to Berlin, where they prepared burials to which politicians were invited. The author briefly introduces the activities of the German group, reconstructs the progress of this intervention and analyses the critical discourse that has developed around this project. She also uses Alfred Gell’s theory of agency to establish a new way of thinking about this action – one that takes into account the agency of dead bodies and problematises their necro-subjectivity.

• Details
• Contents