In their ongoing project European Attraction Limited, Lars Cuzner and Fadlabi present Forensics of Attraction (2013). It is part in their research into the phenomenon of the “human zoo” in European and particularly Norwegian history. For Bergen Assembly, as part of their research they made, as they put it, “a pointless trip to Thailand” to find evidence on the so-called Long-Necked Tribes, the Paduang (aka Kayan) women, who, since the 1980s, have been displaced to ethnic villages built for tourists, which generate massive revenue and have become the raison d’etre of the Thai state. Using the device of “conspirative narrative,” Cuzner and Fadlabi are exposing mechanisms of the spectacle and the complicity it coerces from its viewers.

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“(…) Ours is an age of animal uprisings and imaginary nations of vagabond cats, soy republics, seed vaults, and human zoos—a fluid world under constant surveillance. The future is disappearing, a dream from the past, once a function of love and the lack thereof, now the domain of the ultra-rich. Everything turns to air and water, except those strange footprints in stone. (…)”

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