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.
@ -15,8 +15,13 @@ Talking Documents are performative bureaucratic text inspections that intend to
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.
@ -35,4 +40,4 @@ The marginal voices of potential applicants are embodying and enacting a role.
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.
