Talking Documents are performative bureaucratic text inspections using auto-ethnographical means that intend to create temporal public interventions through performative readings.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
[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]
