Locus terribilis proposes an extension and displacement of Agamben's exceptio: no longer thinking about the nomos of sovereignty, but rather its topos, the archaic place where it comes from and from which all its historical metamorphoses radiate. This terrible place—the paradeisos, the ancient hunting park of the Middle East—appears as the original threshold: a zone of indistinction in which life and power, prey and sovereign, merge to give birth to the figure that will dominate the Western political imagination. In its ritual architecture, the paradeisos is not only a symbolic antecedent, but also the recurring setting that reactivates, in each era, the sovereign exception.
Conceived as a series of numbered notes, Locus terribilis draws on philosophy, art, literature, and popular culture to map sovereignty and the relentless resurgence of its terrible place in different dimensions of contemporary life. Its structure is deliberately interconnected: each note refers to others through internal hyperlinks, allowing the reader to navigate a network or labyrinth of conceptual and narrative associations. Rather than a linear journey, the project offers a system of passages that reproduce the logic of the locus itself: a space of transit, echo, and resonance where ideas lurk like figures in an ancient hunting park.
Organized into two halves—figure and scenario—preceded by a preamble (0. – 0.20) and divided by a threshold (0.21 – 0.30), the project first reconstructs the genealogy of the sovereign figure: from its divine roots to its modern modulations in the dandy, the celebrity, the dictator, and the star. The second part focuses on the displacement of the locus terribilis towards the political, economic, media, and digital forms of our time, revealing how the ancient hunting ground persists, transfigured, in the infrastructures that organize and condition our existence. Taken together, Locus terribilis functions as a travelogue through the desolate landscapes that define our era.
Mauricio Loza, January 2026