This project appeared as a need to explore potential bureaucratic
-dramaturgies within the educational institution I was part as a student.
-I was curious about educational bureaucratic mechanisms being driven by
-smaller-scale paperwork struggles and peers’ narratives, stories and
-experiences. However, unexpected emergencies - due to my eviction on the
-31st of January 2024 - placed centrally my personal struggles unfolded
-in parallel with the making period. I ended up conducting accidentally
-auto-ethnography as the project was dynamically being reshaped due to
-the material constraints of the bureaucratic timeline.
-
Talking Documents are performative bureaucratic text inspections that
-intend to create temporal public interventions through performative
-readings. 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 regulatory mechanism
-reflecting narratives, ideologies, policies.
-
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. 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 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 as the fundamental symbolic
-interface of the bureaucratic network. The transformation of the
-materiality of a document into a scenario to be enacted collectively in
-public aims to examine these artifacts and highlight the shrouded
-performative elements of these processes.
-
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 organized a
-series of performative readings of my own bureaucratic literature in
-different spaces and contexts, pubic and semi-public WDKA, Art Meets
-Radical Openness Festival in Linz, the City Hall of Rotterdam where I
-invited people to perform the play together, like a tiny 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
-school’s building, in the main hall, at the square right across, outside
-of the municipality building.
-
I documented and recorded these public acts and I re-created the
-collectively voiced scenario. This audio piece is a constellation of
-different recordings and soundscapes of these public moments, a vocal
-archive, published in the graduation exhibition of XPUB in 2024.
-
-
-
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Performing the
+ Bureaucratic Border(line)s
+
+
introduction
+
+
This thesis is an assemblage I live
+ somewhere in the margins of scattered references, footnotes, citations,
+ examinations embracing the inconvenience of talking back to myself, to
+ the reader and to all those people whose ideas gave soul to the text. I
+ shelter in the borderlands of the pages my fragmented thoughts, flying
+ words, introspections, voices. Enlightenment and inspiration given by
+ the text “Dear Science” written by Katherine McKittrick. of
+ thoughts, experiences, interpretations, intuitive explorations of what
+ borders are, attempting to unleash a conversation concerning the
+ entangled relation between material injurious borders and bureaucracy. I
+ unravel empirically the thread of how borders as entities are manifested
+ and (de)established. How does the lived experience of crossing multiple
+ borders change and under what conditions?
+
+
The eastern Mediterranean borderland I
+ use the word borderland to refer to Greece as a (mostly) transit zone in
+ the migrants’ and refugees’ route towards Europe., I
+ happened to come from, proves to be one of Europe’s deadly borders
+ towards specific ethnic groups. The embodied experience of borders and
+ practices of (im)mobility change radically depending on the various
+ identities of the people crossing them. As I moved to the Netherlands I
+ started more actively perceiving bureaucracy as another multi-layered
+ border. I was wondering how this situation is shifted and transformed
+ moving towards the European North. What is the role of bureaucracy and
+ how it could be perceived as a mechanism of repulsion for some bodies -
+ a camouflaged border?
+
+
But what is my starting point and where does my precarious body fit
+ within the borders that I am touching? The language of the
+ administrative document is rigid and hurtful but myself lies between the
+ margins of these lines.
+
+
This thesis does not consist of an excessive inquiry about the
+ profoundly complex concepts of borders and bureaucracy. On the contrary,
+ it is initiated by personal concerns, awareness and my positioning. I
+ choose to structure my argument and talk through a personal process that
+ is being unfolded in parallel with the writing period. Accordingly,
+ these words are dynamically being reshaped due to the material
+ constraints of the bureaucratic timeline. A more distant approach became
+ personal and tangible with auto-ethnographical I perceive auto-ethnography as a way to place
+ myself, my lived experiences, my identities, reflections in the
+ (artistic) research and talk through them about structures and within
+ the structures of social, cultural, political frameworks.
+ elements as I was trying to squish myself and my urgencies under these
+ thresholds and fit the A4 document lines.
+
+
I would like at this point to acknowledge and state explicitly my
+ privilege recognizing the different levels of otherness produced by the
+ several bordering mechanisms. My European machine-readable passport as a
+ designed artifact dictates and facilitates the easiness of my mobility.
+ In other (many) cases the lack of it creates profoundly a severe
+ barrier “Passports still function as a
+ technology to control movement. Technologies like RFID chips and face
+ recognition are part of a control system for digital state surveillance.
+ Designing a passport is relative to design a surveillance tool. The
+ analysis of passport designs rarely looks at the social consequences of
+ identification, control, and restriction of movement, which can have
+ violent consequences.” (Ruben Pater, 2021). I do not intend
+ in any respect to compare my case to the lived experiences and struggles
+ of migrants and refugees. I utilize the paperwork interface of my
+ smaller-scale story in order to unravel and foreground the
+ aforementioned questions.
+
+
This thesis is very much indebted to some text-vehicles that
+ mobilized my reflections and nourished the writing process. “Illegal
+ Traveller, an autoethnography of borders” and “Waiting, a Project in
+ conversation” both written by Shahram Khosravi as well as “The Utopia of
+ Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy” by
+ the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber. Graeber initiated his
+ research utilizing the horrendous prolonged bureaucratic processes he
+ had to follow in order to place his sick mother in a nursing home. In
+ parallel, Khosravi’s work is itself the outgrowth of his own ‘embodied
+ experience of borders’, of ethnographic fieldwork among undocumented
+ migrants. I found valuable and inspiring in both texts the personal
+ filter through which they articulate their positioning and develop
+ critique.
+
+
I follow a zoom-in approach in mapping my thoughts beginning from the
+ large-scale rigid border as entity and ending up at the document as the
+ smallest designed artifact of the bureaucratic labyrinth.
+
In the first chapter, I touch the concept of borders in relation to
+ migration. I begin with a personal inspection and comprehension of
+ material borders as entities. Alongside, I interweave in the text the
+ concept of hospitality as a cultural attitude towards ‘strangers’ from
+ the state’s perspective. Conditional and unconditional. How the document
+ I hold in my hands reflects positions on the government’s conditional
+ hospitality and what constraints it dictates.
+
+
In the second chapter, I unpack bureaucracy and focus on its
+ bordering function. From migration ghost bureaucracies to the
+ educational bureaucracies of my surroundings to even smaller components
+ of this apparatus. I end up analyzing the document as a unit within this
+ complex network. Through the “interrogation” of the form as an artifact
+ are emerging issues related to language, graphic design and
+ transparency, universality, and underlying violence.
+
+
In the third and last chapter, I bridge the written text with the
+ ongoing project that runs simultaneously as part of my graduation work
+ in Experimental Publishing, where I mainly speak through my prototypes.
+ Talking documents(5) are performative bureaucratic text inspections,
+ vocal and non-vocal, that intend to create temporal public interventions
+ through performative readings. The intention is to underline how the
+ vocalization of bureaucracies as a tool can potentially reveal their
+ territorial exclusive function and provide space for the invisible
+ vulnerability.
+
+
+
“on the other side is the river
+ and I cannot cross it
+ on the other side is the sea
+ I cannot bridge it”
+ (Anzaldua, 1987)
+
+
+
borders
+
+
How a border is defined? How, as an entity, does it define? How is it
+ performed? I used to think of borders in a material concrete way, coming
+ from a country of the European South that constitutes a rigid, violent
+ border that repulses and kills thousands of migrants and refugees. In
+ the following chapter, I will attempt to explore the terrain of material
+ borders in relation to bureaucracy as another multi-layered filter.
+
+
What constitutes a border? Is it a wall, a line, a fence, a machine,
+ a door, an armed body or a wound on the land? When somebody crosses a
+ border are they consciously aware of the act of crossing? I am crossing
+ the pedestrian street and walking on the white stripes to reach the
+ pedestrian route right across. Are the white stripes a border or a
+ territory to be crossed to reach another situation? Does the way I
+ perform my walking when I step onto the white stripes change? Is there
+ any embodied knowledge about what could be classified as border? Under
+ which circumstances does this knowledge become canonical? I hop over a
+ fence that separates one garden from another. What if instead of
+ assuming that the fence is a device or a furniture or a material of
+ enclosure, it is just part of the same land? The process or act of
+ jumping a fence can be itself a moment of segregation and a moment of
+ re-establishing or demonstrating the bordering function of it.
+
+
Borders could be considered as devices of both exclusion and
+ inclusion that filter people and define forms of circulation and
+ movement in ways no less violent than those applied in repulsive
+ measures. Closure and exclusion are only one function of the
+ nation-state borders. Of course, borders are not always that visible or
+ treated and perceived as borders, as Rumford argues they are “designed
+ not to look like borders, located in one place but projected in another
+ entirely” (Rumford, cited by Keshavarz, 2016, p.298)
+
+
As institutions, they seem to be much more complex, flexible, or even
+ penetrable in comparison with the traditional image of a wall as a
+ bordering device that demonstrates in a way itself. Crossing and borders
+ are inherently defined in relation to each other. “Where there is a
+ border, there is also a border crossing, legal as well as illegal”
+ (Khosravi, 2010).
+
+
conditional hospitality
+
+
I started thinking about hospitality as a cultural behavior and as an
+ inseparable term in the context of borders due to a recent personal
+ bureaucratic experience. Hospitality can be instrumentalized to describe
+ an individual’s as well as a nation’s response towards strangers within
+ their enclosed territory - a property, a home, a land, a country. What
+ does hospitality mean and how hospitality under specific circumstances
+ can be a tool in the hands of a state?
+
+
I will share a personal story related to hospitality and bureaucracy.
+ I was recently evicted from my previous house [31/01/2024] due to a
+ trapping contract situation. My former roommates and I were forced to
+ terminate our previous contract and sign a new one that further limited
+ our rights. The bureaucratic free market language of the contract, the
+ foreign law language barrier, the threats of the agent and the precarity
+ of being homeless in a foreign country forced us to sign the new rental
+ agreement which was the main reason for our eviction. Currently, I am
+ hosted temporarily by friends until I find a more permanent
+ accommodation. Meanwhile, the government requires me to declare the new
+ address which I do not have within five days of my moving. Consequently,
+ I have to follow another bureaucratic path. This involves requesting
+ permission for a short-term postal address while declaring the addresses
+ of my current hosts [4/02/2024]. I gathered the required documents, I
+ processed a 9-page-text and another one with the personal data of my
+ hosts and myself and answered questions about:
+
+
+
why don’t I have a house,
+ who are the people who host me,
+ what is my relationship with them,
+ where do I sleep,
+ where do I store my belongings,
+ how many people are hosting me and accordingly their personal
+ data,
+ for how long,
+ why I cannot register there,
+ what days of the week do I stay in the one house and
+ what days do I stay in the other house,
+ whether and how am I searching for a permanent place and
+ what is the tangible proof of my search?
+
+
+
All these questions provoked thinking around the concept of
+ conditional hospitality as a behavior of the state towards strangers. I
+ can see that on a smaller scale it is being applied to the hospitality I
+ receive from my friends in the middle of an emergency. I am wondering,
+ though, whether is it that important for the government to know on whose
+ couch I sleep or where I store my belongings. The omnipresent gaze of a
+ state who has the right to know every small detail about myself while at
+ the same time questioning people’s hospitality in case of emergency. It
+ seems that forms of knowledge are inseparably related to forms of power.
+ It will take 8 weeks for my request to be processed and for the
+ government to approve or reject if I deserve my friends’
+ hospitality.
+
+
+
+
“Today as yesterday, her land and her time are stolen, only because
+ she is told that she has arrived too late. Much too late”
+ (Khosravi, 2021)
+
+
+
waiting
+
+
Waiting can be considered as a dramaturgical means embedded in
+ bureaucratic procedures that camouflage power relations through the
+ manipulation of people’s time. When people are in the middle of a
+ bureaucratic process and waiting for the government’s decision on their
+ case or just waiting for their turn. “The neoliberal technologies of
+ citizenship enacted through keeping people waiting for jobs, education,
+ housing, health care, social welfare or pensions turn citizens into
+ patients of the state” (Khosravi, 2021). I waited two weeks for a
+ response from the municipality only to discover that my request was
+ rejected [16/02/2024].
+
+
Contemporary border practices mirror past colonial practices, as they
+ exploit migrants’ time by keeping them in prolonged waiting, “like the
+ way colonial capitalism transformed lands to wastelands to plunder the
+ wealth underneath” (Khosravi, 2021). The current border regime, known by
+ extended waiting periods and constant delays, is part of a larger
+ project aimed at taking away wealth, labor, and time through colonial
+ accumulation and immediate expulsion.
+
+
When someone opens their house to a guest, a stranger, someone in
+ need, means that they open their property to someone. Hospitality is
+ interweaved with a sense of ownership over something. Expanding the
+ concept of hospitality to a nation-scale, we could say that the
+ nation-building process involves people asserting artificial ownership
+ over a territory even if they do not own any property within this
+ land.
+
+
Conditional hospitality is tied to a sense of offering back to the
+ home-land-nation-state-country as a way to win or trade your permission
+ to enter and enjoy the hospitality of a place. Coming from specific
+ places in comparison to others, having to offer some special skills or
+ your labor - if it is asked for - can be possible conditions that may
+ allow somebody to receive hospitality. I would say that an efficient
+ check of these conditions is regularly facilitated through bureaucratic
+ channels. The concept of unconditional-conditional hospitality is
+ closely related to exchange. When you do not have something to offer
+ according to the needs or expectations of a “household”, you may not
+ receive the gift of hospitality.
+
+
The notion of hospitality is excessively instrumentalized within the
+ Greek context portrayed as an “ideal” intertwined with the
+ nation-building narrative and as a foundational quality - product by the
+ Greek tourist industry. However, the Greek sea has been an endless
+ refugee graveyard and the eastern Aegean islands a “warehouse of
+ souls”For further reading:
+ https://wearesolomon.com/mag/focus-area/migration/how-the-aegean-islands-became-a-warehouse-of-souls/
+ for the last many years. In this case, conditional hospitality applies
+ primarily to those who invest in and consume.
+
+
Hospitality can function as a filtration mechanism that permits
+ access – lets in – the ones who deserve it, those who have “passports,
+ valid visas, adequate bank statements, or invitations” (Khosravi, 2010).
+ By doing this, unproductive hospitality is being avoided due to
+ sovereign state’s border regulations and checks. Conditional
+ hospitality, is about worthiness, is directed towards migrants deemed
+ good and productive – skilled and capable for assimilation- or a tiny
+ minority of vulnerable and marginalized asylum seekers who lack
+ representation. Only in a world where the nation-state’s boundaries have
+ been dismantled and where the undocumented, stateless, non-citizens are
+ unconditionally accepted, only at this moment, we are able to imagine
+ the “political and ethical survival of humankind” (Agamben, 2000).
+ Hospitality does not seem a matter of choice but a profound urgency, if
+ humanity desires to foster a future together.
+
+
“the right to have rights”
+
+
(Arendt, as cited by Khosravi, 2010, p.121) What about the crossers
+ who managed to travel and reach the desirable “there”, the ones who
+ transcended the borders and the control checks of the ministries of
+ defense(7), the ones who enter but do not own papers, the paperless?
+ What does it mean to be documented and what is inefficiently documented
+ within a territory? They are threatened if they get caught by
+ authorities and also according to the official narrative, they threaten.
+ Since the physical mechanisms of bordering did not succeed in repulsing
+ them, the bureaucratic border appears as an additional layer of
+ filtration. The undocumented are non-citizens, they might be crossers or
+ burners(8), both, or even none. “Undocumented migrants and unauthorized
+ border crossers are polluted and polluting because of their very
+ unclassifiability” (Borelli, Poy, Rué, 2023). The loss of citizenship,
+ denaturalisation, makes somebody denaturalised, they are rendered
+ unnatural. “Citizenship has become the nature of being human” (Koshravi,
+ 2010).
+
+
According to Hannah Arendt, the right to have rights and claim
+ somebody else’s rights is the only human right (Arendt, as cited by
+ Khosravi, 2010, p. 121). The foundational issue with the Universal
+ Declaration of Human Rights is its dependence on the nation-state
+ system. Since human rights are grounded on civil rights, which are
+ essentially citizens’ rights, human rights are tied to the nation-state
+ system. Consequently, human rights can be materialized only in a
+ political community. “Loss of citizenship also means loss of human
+ rights” (Khosravi, 2010)
+
+
+
“…This is a transcribed recording of
+ my phone during a protest on migration at Dam Square in Amsterdam. I
+ insert part of the speech of a Palestinian woman addressing the matter
+ of undocumentedness. Date and time of the recording 18th of June 2023,
+ 15:05. I am here for the rights of the children which
+ haven’t be in the taking part in the education since they have
+ undocumented mothers and they are more than
+ “” means
+ undecipherable years. I am here to represent mothers who
+ are looking for a place to have a sense of belonging or how long are you
+ trying to continue humiliating them and the female gender. I am here to
+ express my frustration with INDImmigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst - Dutch
+ Immigration and Naturalisation Service. So frustrated. And
+ I will not stop talking about democracy. Democracy is the rule of law
+ where everybody feels included. Democracy is a rule of law where
+ everybody feels * We, undocumented people, we don’t feel a sense of
+ belonging from the system.”
+
+
+
bureaucracy as immaterial
+ border
+
+
Apart from the rigid visible borders, bureaucracy related to
+ migrants, refugees and asylum seekers can also constitute an in-between
+ less visible borderland. I used to perceive bureaucracy as an immaterial
+ and intangible entity. However, now I can claim that this assumption is
+ not true. Bureaucracy is material and spatial and can be seen as an
+ apparatus, a machine, a circuitry, an institution, a territory, a
+ borderland, a body, a zone – a “dead zone of imagination” as Graeber
+ claims. It can be inscribed on piles of papers, folders, drawers,
+ booklets, passports, IDs, documents, screens, tapes, bodies, hospital
+ corridors, offices, permissions to enter, stay, work, travel, exist,
+ come and go, leave, visit family, bury a friend.
+
+
Bureaucratic documents especially those related to migration, can
+ become territories or should be interpreted “as sites where social
+ interactions happen, where power relations unfold and are contested”
+ (Cretton, Geoffrion, 2021). When these bureaucratic objects are used and
+ manipulated, they can constitute sites of “confrontation, reproduction,
+ negotiation and performance” (Cretton, Geoffrion, 2021) shaping social
+ relations and producing meaning.
+
+
Bureaucracy related to asylum seekers reveals the profound bordering
+ nature of these practices, as a continuous process of producing
+ otherness. Accordingly, I see bureaucracy as a practice that raises
+ material and symbolic walls for specific groups of people who are
+ rendered unwanted and unwelcome because they dared to cross the borders
+ of the Global North. It is as if they could never manage to eventually
+ arrive and shelter their lives within the desirable “there”I am referring to the desirable potential
+ destinations of migrants and refugees corresponding mainly to Global
+ North countries.. “In these bordering processes, we can
+ detect the “coloniality of asylum”In this
+ text they insert the concept of the “coloniality of asylum” introduced
+ by Picozza, which talks about how asylum systems are intertwined with
+ colonial legacies and power dynamics. These systems are often colonial
+ structures reinforcing hierarchies between nations and reproducing
+ patterns of domination and oppression. In this framework, asylum is not
+ just about offering protection but also about regulating and managing
+ populations in a way that reflects colonial relationships.
+ (Borelli, Poy, Rué, 2023). Bureaucracies in practice act as filters,
+ determining who, from an institutional standpoint, deserves to receive
+ protection and who does not. They operate as systems that classify
+ non-citizens and place them in a social hierarchy of disproportionate
+ unequal obligations, lack of rights and access to institutional
+ support.
+
+
higher education’s
+ expanding bureaucracy
+
+
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.
+ How can higher education in a European country reflect policies around
+ migration and border control less profoundly. How can education filter
+ and distinguish, how it can reproduce efficiently itself?
+
+
I gradually started perceiving the bureaucratic apparatus as an
+ omnipresent immaterial border - a ghost infrastructure - that one always
+ encounters but does not really see, a borderland that lies in the gray
+ zone between visibility and invisibility. Bureaucracy renders us
+ “stupid” and vulnerable in front of it. It is rarely questioned but it
+ should be performed efficiently for people to exist properly.
+
+
The contradiction embedded in many cultural and educational
+ institutions lies in the level of unawareness regarding surveillance via
+ multiple bureaucratic rituals that (re)produce docile behaviors. How
+ these mechanisms are masked and standing in the margins of the visible
+ nonvisible sphere.
+
+
+
+
“This is what makes it possible, for example, for graduate students
+ to be able to spend days in the stacks of university libraries poring
+ over Foucault-inspired theoretical tracts about the declining importance
+ of coercion as a factor in modern life without ever reflecting on that
+ fact that, had they insisted their right to enter the stacks without
+ showing a properly stamped and validated ID, armed men would have been
+ summoned to physically remove them, using whatever force might be
+ required.”
+ (Graeber, 2015)
+
+
+
The genuine essence of education is not bureaucratic at all, neither
+ does it have to fit and ground its foundations under a bureaucratic
+ roof. “The pedagogical process runs counter to the hierarchical,
+ impersonal qualities of bureaucracy” (Cunningham, 2017). However, people
+ working in educational institutions acknowledge the fact that entrenched
+ bureaucratic systems impose their material constraints on teaching
+ structures and on how these actors in this process interact with each
+ other.“Students and staff are treated as human capital” (Cunningham,
+ 2017). This determination can dehumanize people involved, like when
+ “faculty-as-labor” and “students-as-consumers” are marginalized and
+ treated as just variables.
+
+
+
“there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a
+ document of barbarism”
+ Walter Benjamin
+
+
+
the document
+
+
From fences and armed police to nation-state mechanism of
+ less-material bordering to bureaucracy to the elements of bureaucracy to
+ the document itself as the minimum unit of an apparatus. Understanding
+ and unhiding the violence of a form -violence materialized and at the
+ same time camouflaged by the language structure, the vocabulary, the
+ graphic design, their ability to render subjectivities that fit and
+ don’t fit within the controlled territory of the lines of the form. A
+ language that fragments, classifies, places and un-places. Thus
+ bureaucratic apparatus is something more than a metaphor it is also a
+ symbol. It is hard to see that there are many more layers beneath the
+ purpose it propagates. A metaphor that is so perfectly materialized as
+ well as naturalized that you cannot even see it.
+
+
bureaucracy as textual
+ institution
+
+
The bureaucratic apparatus can be considered as something more than
+ an infrastructure that organizes institutions, markets, states, etc. It
+ can constitute itself an institution, a textual institution. As the
+ factory generates commodities and sets them within a circuit of motion,
+ bureaucracy generates documents and sets them throughout a communicative
+ circuitry (Cunningham, 2017). An institution that organizes and
+ (infra)structures other institutions and similarly reproduces itself
+ through text. The materiality of a text document reflects the ideology
+ of the interconnected institutions and their underlying bureaucratic
+ systems. Language occupies a dual contradictory role as the foundational
+ element of bureaucracy. Language can become a shroud to conceal the
+ violence and reinforce hierarchical structures and simultaneously can be
+ transformed into the rigid rational cell itself. They shape their own
+ narratives, they reflect the institutional narratives.
+
+
the myth of universality
+
+
One of the great powers of bureaucracies is their ability to render
+ themselves transparent. It seems that bureaucracy does not have to say
+ anything more beyond itself, is self-referential and self-contained. It
+ is boring or most likely is supposed to be boring. “One can describe the
+ ritual surrounding it. One can observe how people talk about or react to
+ it” (Graeber, 2015). The supposed universality of the form which is
+ carefully constructed can be partly attributed to the individuality and
+ impersonality of many bureaucratic processes. “Bureaucracies operate
+ through an assemblage of hierarchy, impersonality, and procedure in
+ order to complete organizational tasks with maximum efficiency” (Weber,
+ as cited by Cunningham, 2017, p. 307).
+
+
I had to open a discussion with students from non-EEA (non European
+ Economic Area) countries in order to understand that they have to
+ conduct tuberculosis x-rays“To keep the
+ Residence Permit, some non-European students need to visit the Dutch
+ Public Health Authority (GGD) after they arrived in the Netherlands.
+ They will undergo a medical test for tuberculosis (TB). This is a
+ requirement from the IND (Dutch Immigration Office)”. (Introduction
+ days, 2021) when they arrive in the Netherlands. It seems
+ that for the Dutch state, their bodies might be more threatening than
+ bodies coming from a European country. The relativization in the quality
+ and the quantity of paperwork requested from different “groups” of
+ applicants in a specific context deconstructs the myth of the
+ universality of the bureaucratic form.
+
+
Undoubtedly the success of bureaucracy is drawn from its efficiency
+ in relation to schematization as an efficient material quality. “Whether
+ it’s a matter of forms, rules, statistics, or questionnaires, it is
+ always a matter of simplification (Cunningham, 2017)”. Bureaucracies
+ ignore the social existence of a person and fragment, classify and
+ define them under specific perspectives. Why do they ask for this
+ information instead of others? “Why place of birth and not, say, place
+ where you went to grade school? What’s so important about the
+ signature?” (Graeber, 2015)
+
+
materiality-underlying
+ violence
+
+
There is a great materiality in bureaucracies. Bureaucratic
+ procedures are often compared to a labyrinth which appears as a
+ similarly complex structure constituted by simple geometrical shapes
+ (Weber, as cited by Cunningham, 2017, p.310). Bureaucratic documents can
+ be complicated and multiple due to this infinite accumulation of really
+ simple but at the same time contradictory elements. A constant
+ juxtaposition of letters, symbols, stamps, signatures, paper, ink,
+ barcodes, QR codes within a circuit of workers, interweaved and
+ interconnected offices, repetitive performative tasks and rituals.
+
+
Underneath every bureaucratic document, there is a good amount of
+ graphic design labor. What kind of visual strategy is embedded in
+ administrative objects that the design aspect of these artifacts appears
+ to be invisible? The material decisions applied as well as the material
+ constraints attributed to the document can transform or produce
+ different textual meanings and consequently understandings.
+
+
+
“This does not mean that constraints limit meaning, but on the
+ contrary, constitute it; meaning cannot appear where freedom is absolute
+ or nonexistent: the stem of meaning is that of a supervised
+ freedom”
+ (Roland Barthes, 1983)
+
+
+
When I encountered the green logo of the municipality of Rotterdam I
+ did not cultivate any feelings of enthusiasm or even boredom. A big
+ calligraphic “R” with the flawless green ribbons that penetrate it on
+ the left corner of a 229x162 mm standardized dimension folder with a
+ transparent rectangle that reveals my inscribed name and surname from
+ the inside part. I did not put any aesthetic critique over this but I
+ rather felt this rush of stress for the expected response to my
+ objection letter or a fine or a tax to be paid within a specific
+ timeline cause another fine would come if I did not comply with
+ this.
+
+
One month ago (from the writing present), my friend Chae made for my
+ birthday this amazing Dutch-government-like biscuit forms, recreating
+ the entire layout of the document using the interface of a crunchy
+ biscuit. She used the same color blue scheme and she placed the biscuit
+ form inside the same standardized dimension folder 229x162 mm with the
+ same transparent layer that reveals my name and surname. According to
+ literary critic and theorist Katherine Hayles:
+
+
+
“to alter the physical form of the artifacts is to change the act of
+ reading and understanding but mostly you transform the metaphoric and
+ symbolic network that structures the relation of world to world. To
+ change the material artifacts is to transform the context and
+ circumstances for interacting with the words, which inevitably change
+ the meaning of the word itself. This transformation of meaning is
+ especially possible when the words interact with the inscription
+ technologies that produce them”
+ (Hayles, 2002)
+
+
+
In the latter case, the inscription technology used is the sugar blue
+ paste and the handwriting of Chae. The text in the white-blue government
+ document forces a different reading from the white-blue biscuit
+ document, even if they carry the same bits of information. If I do not
+ read carefully the text in the folder and if I do not act according to
+ the suggested actions there is a threat. The level of threat varies in
+ relation to the case, the identities of the holder, the state, the
+ context, etc. There is no room for negotiation in bureaucracy and this
+ is the omnipresent underlying violence. The threat of violence shrouded
+ within its structures and foundations does not permit any questioning
+ but on the contrary creates “willful blindness” towards themI am referring to those people subjecting others to
+ bureaucratic circles shaped by structurally violent situations as well
+ as people in positions of privilege who deliberately ignore these
+ facts.. Bureaucracies are not stupid inherently rather they
+ manage and coerce processes that reproduce docile and stupid
+ behaviors.
+
+
+
+
vocal archives-talking
+ documents
+
+
This chapter is mainly a constellation of some prototypes I created
+ while writing and coping with personal bureaucratic challenges. I
+ provided some further space for my anxiety by unpacking and exploring
+ the material conditions that nourished it within this timeline.
+
+
An administrative decision on a case may not seem necessarily hurtful
+ in linguistic terms. However, it can be injurious and severely
+ threatening. By performing the bureaucratic archival material of my
+ interactions with the government, I aim to draw a parallel narrative
+ highlighting the bordering role of bureaucracy and the concealed
+ underlying violence it perpetuates.
+
+
A bureaucratic text does not just describe a reality, a decision, a
+ case or an action, but on the contrary, it is capable of changing the
+ reality or the order of things that is described via these words.
+ Bureaucratic official documents are inherently performative. These texts
+ regulate and bring situations into being.
+
+
My intention in transforming bureaucratic texts into “playable”
+ scenarios is to explore how embodying these texts in public through
+ collective speechI imagine the theatrical
+ play as a “human microphone”, a low-tech amplification device. A group
+ of people performs the bureaucratic scenario in chorus, out loud, in the
+ corridor of the school’s building, in the main hall, at the square right
+ across, outside of the municipality building. The term is borrowed from
+ the protests of the Occupy Wall Street Movement in 2011. People were
+ gathered around the speaker repeating what the speaker was saying in
+ order to ensure that everyone could hear the announcements during large
+ assemblies. Human bodies became a hack in order to replace the forbidden
+ technology. In New York it is required to ask for permission from
+ authorities to use “amplified sound” in public space. can
+ provoke different forms of interpretations and open tiny conceptual
+ holes. “The meaning of a performative act is to be found in this
+ apparent coincidence of signifying and enacting” (Butler, 1997). The
+ performative bureaucratic utterances - the vocal documents - attempt to
+ bring into existence -by overidentifying, exaggerating, acting- the
+ discomfort, the threat, the violence which is mainly condemned into
+ private individual spheres.
+
+
How performing a collection of small bureaucratic stories can
+ function as an instant micro intervention and potentially produce a
+ public discourse. Where do we perform this speech, where and when does
+ the “theater” take place? Who is the audience? I am particularly
+ interested in the site-specificity of these “acts”. How can these
+ re-enactments be situated in an educational context and examine its
+ structures? Is it possible for this small-scale publics to provoke the
+ emergence of temporal spaces of marginal vulnerable voicings? According
+ to the agonistic approach of the political theorist Chantal Mouffe,
+ critical art is art that provokes dissensus, that makes visible what the
+ dominant narrative tends to undermine and displace. “It is constituted
+ by a multiplicity of artistic practices aiming at giving a voice to all
+ those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony”
+ (Mouffe, 2008).
+
+
I started working and engaging more with different bureaucratic
+ material that my peers and I encountered regularly or appeared in our
+ (e)mail (in)boxes and are partly related to our identities as foreign
+ students coming from different places. I chose to start touching and
+ looking for various bureaucracies that surround me as a personal filter
+ towards it. From identification documents and application forms to
+ rental contracts, funding applications, visa applications, quality
+ assurance questionnaires related to the university, assessment criteria,
+ supermarket point gathering cards, receipts. A sequence of locked doors
+ to be unlocked more or less easily via multiple bureaucratic keys. The
+ methods and tools used to scrutinize the administrative artifacts are
+ not rigid or distinct. It is mainly a “collection” of small bureaucratic
+ experiments - closely related to language as well as the performative
+ “nature” of these texts themselves. I was intrigued by how transforming
+ the material conditions of a piece of text could influence the potential
+ understandings and perceptions of its meaning.
+
+
prototypes
+
+
1.
+
+
Title: “Quality Assurance Questionnaire
+ Censoring”
+ When: October 2023
+ Where: XPUB studio wall
+ Who: myself
+
+
Description: Some months ago my classmates and I received an email
+ with a questionnaire aimed at preparing us for the upcoming quality
+ assurance meeting within the school. Ada and I had a meeting, in an
+ empty white room with closed doors, with an external collaborator of the
+ university. The main request was to rate and answer the pre-formulated
+ questions covering issues about performance, different and multiple
+ topics related to the course, the teaching staff, the facilities, the
+ tools provided. The micro linguistic experiment of highlighting,
+ censoring and annotating this document aimed for an understanding of
+ what a quality assurance meeting is within an educational
+ institution.
+
+
Reflections-Thoughts: This experiment was my first attempt to start
+ interrogating and observing the language and the structure of a
+ bureaucratic document. How these “desired” standards propagated through
+ text. What is the role of the student-client in these processes as an
+ esoteric gaze of control over the course and their teachers? My focus
+ was to locate and accumulate all the wording related to measurements,
+ rate, quantity, assessments, statistics. Highlighting the
+ disproportionate amount of metrics-related vocabulary was enough to
+ craft the narrative around this process.
+
+
These ‘rituals’ are components of a larger “culture of evidence”,
+ serving as a tool that blurs the distinction between discourse and
+ reality (Cunningham, 2017). This culture of evidence influences how
+ people perceive and understand information. The primary purposes of
+ these metrics are twofold: they play a role in the marketing sphere,
+ attracting potential students to the university as well as they are
+ utilized in interactions and negotiations with the government, which
+ increasingly cuts budgets allocated to universities.
+
+
+
+
2.
+
+
Title: “Department of Bureaucracy and Administration
+ Customs Enforcement”
+ When: November 2023
+ Where: LeeszaalCommunity
+ Library in Rotterdam West
+ Who: XPUB peers, tutors, friends, alumni
+
+
Description: During the first public moment at Leeszaal, I decided to
+ embody and enact the traditional role of a bureaucrat in a graphic and
+ possibly absurd way performing a small “theatrical play”. I prepared a
+ 3-page and a 1-page document incorporating bureaucratic-form aesthetics
+ and requesting applicants’ fake data and their answers for questions
+ related to educational bureaucracy. People receiving an applicant number
+ at the entrance of Leeszaal, queuing to collect their documents from the
+ administration “office”, filling forms, waiting, receiving stamps,
+ giving fingerprints and signing, waiting again were the main components
+ of this act.
+
+
Reflections-Thoughts: Beyond the information gathered through my
+ bureaucratic-like questionnaires, the most crucial element of this
+ experiment was the understanding and highlighting of the hidden
+ performative elements that entrench these “rituals”. It was amazing
+ seeing the audience becoming instantly actors of the play enacting
+ willingly a administrative ritualistic scene. The provided context of
+ this “play” was a social library hosting a masters course public event
+ on graduation projects. I am wondering whether this asymphony between
+ the repetitive bureaucratic acts within the space of Leeszaal, where
+ such acts are not expected to be performed, evoked contradictory
+ feelings or thoughts. Over-identifying with a role was being
+ instrumentalized as an “interrogation” of one’s own involvement in the
+ reproduction of social discourses, power, authority, hegemony.
+
+
+
+
+
+
3.
+
+
Title: “Passport Reading Session”
+ When: January 2024
+ Where: XML – XPUB studio
+ Who: Ada, Aglaia, Stephen, Joseph
+
+
Description: This prototype is a collective passport reading session.
+ I asked my classmates to bring their passports or IDs and sitting in a
+ circular set up we attempted to “scan” our documents. Every contributor
+ took some time to browse, annotate verbally, interpret, understand,
+ analyze, vocalize their thoughts on these artifacts, approaching them
+ from various perspectives. The three passports and one ID card were all
+ coming from European countries.
+
+
Reflections-Thoughts: For the first time I observed this object so
+ closely. The documentation medium was a recording device, Ada’s mobile
+ phone. The recording was transcribed by voskVosk is an offline open-source speech recognition
+ toolkit. and myself and a small booklet of our passport
+ readings was created.
+
+
+
“So the object here is like not by random it comes from the history
+ of nation-states and how nation-states and nationalities created like a
+ form of identity. So nation-state is actually a recent invention that
+ came into existence over the last two hundred fifty years in the form as
+ we know it nowadays, in the form of democratic capitalism, before like
+ monarchies and so on and each citizen of such a nation-state got also
+ kind of a particular identity”,
+ Joseph says about his ID card.
+
+
+
We read the embedded signs, symbols, categories, texts, magical
+ numbers in our passports that construct our profiles. Seeing someone’s
+ passport, ID cards, visas, travel documents might mean that you are able
+ to understand how easy or not is for them to move, what are their travel
+ paths, how departure or arrival is smooth or cruel. Are there emotions
+ along the way? For some people these are documents “that embody power —
+ minimal or no waiting, peaceful departure, warm and confident arrival”
+ (Khosravi, 2021).
Description: This scenario is the first part of a series of small
+ episodes that construct a bureaucratic story unfolding the processes of
+ my communication with the government. The body of the text of the
+ “theatrical” script is sourced from the original documents as well as
+ recordings of the conversation I had with the municipality throughout
+ this process. I preserved the sequence of the given sentences and by
+ discarding the graphic design of the initial form, I structured and
+ repurposed the text into a scenario. The main actors were two
+ bureaucrats vocalizing the questions addressed in the form, in turns and
+ sometimes speaking simultaneously like a choir, three applicants
+ answering the questions similarly while a narrator mainly provided the
+ audience with the context and the storyline constructing the scenery of
+ the different scenes.
+
+
The first and the last moment of the performance was during a
+ semi-public tryout moment where XPUB peers performed the distributed
+ scenario in a white room on the 4th floor of the Winjhaven building.
+ They were seated having as a border a black long-table. A border
+ furniture between the bureaucrats and the applicants. The narrator was
+ standing still behind them while they were surrounded by the audience.
+ The main documentation media of the act were a camera on a tripod, a
+ recorder in the middle of the table and myself reconstructing the memory
+ of the re-enactement at that present - 6 days later.
+
+
Reflections-Thoughts: Vocalizing and embodying the bureaucratic
+ questions was quite useful in acknowledging the government’s voice and
+ presence as something tangible rather than a floating, arbitrary entity.
+ It was interesting observing the bureaucrats performing their role with
+ confidence and entitlement, contrasting with the applicants who appeared
+ to be more stressed to respond convincingly and promptly. There is a
+ notable distinction between performativity and performance. Performing
+ consciously and theatrically amplifying real bureaucratic texts by
+ occupying roles and overidentifying with them can constitute a
+ diffractive moment, a tool itself. From bureaucratic text to
+ performative text scenarios to speech. The embedded (but rather
+ unconscious) performativity of “real” bureaucratic rituals establishes
+ and empowers (bureaucratic) institutions through repetitive acts. These
+ theatrical moments attempt to highlight the shrouded performative
+ elements of these processes.
next
+ chapters of the case with reference number A.B.2024.4.03188
+
+
I expanded the “play” by incorporating additional “scenes” sourced
+ again from the documents accompanying the ongoing “conversation with the
+ government”. Two weeks after submitting my application for a short-term
+ postal address [16/02/2024], I received a letter from the municipality
+ stating their rejection of my request and warning me of potential fines
+ if I fail to declare a valid address and provide a rental contract.
+ After extensive communication with the municipality, I decided to
+ respond to this decision by writing and sending an objection letter
+ [19/02/2024]. The objections committee received my letter [21/02/2024],
+ and after some days, they issued a confirmation letter outlining the
+ following steps of the objection process which involves hearings with
+ municipality lawyers and further investigation of my case. The textual
+ components collaged for the next “episodes” are sourced from the
+ transcribed recordings of my actual conversations with the municipality
+ clerks, my objection letter, the confirmation documents including the
+ steps I am required to take.
+
+
My case has finished by this time. I withdrew my objection
+ [7/03/2024] and I de-registered [11/03/2024] after a good amount of
+ stress and precarity. My bureaucratic literature is meant to be read and
+ voiced collectively. People’s bureaucratic literatures should be read
+ and voiced collectively.
+
+
My intention is to facilitate a series of collective performative
+ readings of bureaucratic scenarios or other portable paperwork stories
+ as a way of publishing and inspecting bureaucratic bordering
+ infrastructures. The marginal voices of potential applicants are
+ embodying and performing a role. “The speech does not only describe but
+ brings things into existence” (Austin, 1975). I would like to stretch
+ the limits of dramaturgical speech through vocalizing a document in
+ public with others and turn an individual administrative case into a
+ public one. 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. I am inviting past and
+ future applicants, traumatized students, injured bearers, bureaucratic
+ border crossers, stressed expired document holders or just curious
+ people to share, vocalize, talk through, read out loud, amplify,
+ (un)name, unplace, dismantle the injurious words of these artifacts.
+
+
+
+
“we didn’t
+ cross the border, the border crossed us”(20)
+
As I sit in the waiting area at the gate B7 in the airport preparing
+ to come back to the Netherlands, I am writing the last lines of this
+ text. I am thinking of all these borders and gates that my body was able
+ to pass through smoothly, carrying my magical object through which I
+ embody power- at least within this context. However, I yearn for a
+ reality where we stop looking at those bodies that cross the
+ multifaceted borders and get crossed and entrenched by them, but on the
+ contrary we start interrogating and shouting at the contexts and the
+ frameworks that construct them and render them invisible, natural and
+ powerful.
+
+
references
+
+
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+ MN: University of Minnesota Press.
+
+
Anzaldua, G. (1987) Borderlands - la Frontera: The new mestiza. 2nd
+ ed. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.
+
+
Austin, J. L. (1975) “lECTURE VII”, in How to do things with words.
+ Oxford University Press, pp.83-93.
+
+
Barthes, R. (1983) Fashion system. Translated by M. Ward and R.
+ Howard. Hill & Wang.
+
+
Border controls (2017) Defensie.nl. Available at:
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+
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+
+
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+
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+
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+
+
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+
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+
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+
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+
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+
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