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2 months ago
<div id="content"><h1 id="talking-documents">Talking Documents</h1>
<h3 id="section"></h3>
<p>Talking Documents are performative bureaucratic text inspections
using auto-ethnographical means that intend to create temporal public
interventions through performative readings.</p>
<p>While I had this inherent concern about borders and bureaucratic
structures in relation to migration, I decided to start zooming in and
explore my own bureaucratic surroundings through my personal lens. As a
student, I was eager to understand and dig into the educational
institutions bureaucratic mechanisms being driven by smaller-scale
bureaucratic struggles and peers narratives, stories and experiences.
My starting point were concerns and a need to explore potential
bureaucratic dramaturgies within the educational institution I am
currently part as a student. However, unexpected emergencies placed
centrally my personal bureaucratic struggles that were being unfolded in
parallel with the making period. Accordingly, this project was
dynamically being reshaped due to the material constraints of the
bureaucratic timeline. I utilized the paperwork interface of my
smaller-scale story in order to unravel and foreground questions related
to the role of bureaucracy as less material border and as a mechanism of
regulation that reflects narratives, ideologies, policies of the
state.</p>
<p>The scenario Central element of this project is a seven-act scenario
that construct my personal paperwork story, unraveling the actual
struggles of my communication with the government due my recent eviction
on the 31st of January 2024. The body of the text of the “theatrical”
script is sourced from the original documents, email threads as well as
recordings of the conversations with the municipality of Rotterdam that
I documented and archived throughout this period. I preserved the
sequence of the given sentences and by discarding the graphic design of
the initial forms, I structured and repurposed the text into a playable
scenario. I perceive the document as a unit and the primary interface of
the bureaucratic network. The embedded performativity of “real”
bureaucratic rituals establishes and empowers (bureaucratic)
institutions through repetitive acts. The transformation of the
materiality of a document into a scenario to be enacted collectively in
public attempts to examine these artifacts and highlight the shrouded
performative elements of these processes.</p>
<p>The public readings of the scenario I see the collective readings of
these scenarios as a way of instant publishing and as a communal tool of
inspecting bureaucratic bordering infrastructures. How can these
re-enactments be situated in different institutional contexts and
examine their structures? I am particularly interested in the
site-specificity of these “acts”. I organized a series of performative
readings of my own bureaucratic literature in different spaces and
contexts, pubic and semi-public, like Leeszaal, WDKA, Art Meets Radical
Openness Festival in Linz, the City Hall of Rotterdam where I invited
people to perform the play together, like a theater. The marginal voices
of potential applicants are embodying and enacting a role. “The speech
does not only describe but brings things into existence”(Austin, 1975).
My intention was to stretch the limits of dramaturgical speech through
vocalizing a document and turn individual administrative cases into
public ones. How do the inscribed words in the documents are not
descriptive but on the contrary “are instrumentalized in getting things
done”(Butler,1997). Words as active agents. Bodies as low-tech “human
microphones”. A group of people performs the bureaucratic scenario in
chorus, out loud, in the corridor of the schools building, in the main
hall, at the square right across, outside of the municipality
building.</p>
<p>I documented and recorded these public acts and I re-created the
collectively vocalised and transformed scenario. This audio piece is a
constellation of different recordings and soundscapes of these public
moments that I edited and collaged into a single story that could
constitute a vocal archive.</p>
<p>I am inviting past and future applicants, traumatized students,
injured bearers, bureaucratic border crossers, stressed expired document
holders to share, vocalize, read out loud, amplify, (un)name, dismantle
the injurious words of these artifacts.</p>
<p>[images] [Leeszaal West Rotterdam - 7th of November 2023 People
queuing to receive their documents] [WDKA- Winjhaven Building- 5th of
February 2024- reading of act0 “” and act1 “”] [Art Meets Radical
Openness Festival Linz, Austria - 11th of May 2024 - Reading act 2””
and act3 “” in the tent] x2 [City Hall Rotterdam- 30th of May 2024 -
Reading of act 5 “” and act 6 “”] x2 [XML at XPUB studio - January 2024
- Passport Reading Session] [BOOKLET 1] [BOOKLET 2]</p>
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