@ -53,28 +53,22 @@ I started thinking about hospitality as a cultural behavior and as an inseparabl
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?
> 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”
> “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
@ -115,18 +109,13 @@ I gradually started perceiving the bureaucratic apparatus as an omnipresent imma
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)
> “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-
> “there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”,
Walter Benjamin
### the document
@ -150,13 +139,14 @@ There is a great materiality in bureaucracies. Bureaucratic procedures are often
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)
> “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).
> “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 them<sup><spanclass="margin-note">I 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.</span></sup>. Bureaucracies are not stupid inherently rather they manage and coerce processes that reproduce docile and stupid behaviors.
@ -216,7 +206,8 @@ Description: This prototype is a collective passport reading session. I asked my
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 vosk<sup><spanclass="margin-note">Vosk is an offline open-source speech recognition toolkit.</span></sup> 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.
> “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).
@ -253,53 +244,28 @@ My intention is to facilitate a series of collective performative readings of bu
#### “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.
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.
### s i d e n o t e s
1. 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.
2. I use the word borderland to refer to Greece as a (mostly) transit zone in the migrants’ and refugees’ route towards Europe.
3. 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.
4. “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)
5. Working title of the project
6. For further reading: https://wearesolomon.com/mag/focus-area/migration/how-the-aegean-islands-became-a-warehouse-of-souls/
7. One of the tactics for regulating or preventing the so-called unproductive hospitality is border control checks. According to the website of the Ministry of Defense of the Netherlands, “the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee (RNLM) combats cross-border crime and makes an important contribution to national security. Checks are still performed at the external borders of the Schengen area. In the Netherlands, this means guarding the European external border at airports and seaports, and along the coast. By participating in Frontex, the European border control agency, the RNLM makes an important contribution to the control of Europe’s external borders in other EU member states. There is one single EU external border.” (Border Controls, 2017)
8. I would like to refer to the practice of Harragas introduced by my friend Rabab as a counter-act of dealing or breaking or burning the multilayered borders. The burners or Harragas is a term alluding to the migrants’ practice of burning their identity papers and personal documents in order to prevent identification by authorities in Europe. Crucially this moving out is in defiance of the bureaucratic rules and their elaborate visa systems. Those who engage in harraga, ‘burn’ borders to enter European territories. “They do not, however, burn the bridges to the people and places they depart from. To these, they keep all kinds of links. For, as they burn borders, they don’t move away from their place of origin. Harraga is about expanding living space” (M’charek, 2020).
9. 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.
10. “*” means undecipherable
11. Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst - Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service
12. I am referring to the desirable potential destinations of migrants and refugees corresponding mainly to Global North countries.
13. 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.
14. “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)
15. I 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.
16. I 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.
17. Community Library in Rotterdam West
18. I was thinking of queues as a spatial oppressive tool used often by (bureaucratic) authorities. The naturalized image of bodies-in-a-line waiting for “something” to happen at “some point” under the public gaze in an efficiently defined area.
19. Vosk is an offline open-source speech recognition toolkit
20. US Immigrant Rights Movement Slogan (Keshavarz, 2016)
### r e f e r e n c e s
Agamben, G. (2000) Means without end: Notes on politics. Minneapolis, 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: https://english.defensie.nl/topics/border-controls
Borelli, C., Poy, A., and Rué, A. (2023). "Governing Asylum without 'Being There': Ghost Bureaucracy, Outsourcing, and the Unreachability of the State." *Social Sciences*, 12(3), 169. [DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12030169]
Butler, J. (1997) Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. London, England: Routledge.
Cretton, V., Geoffrion, K. (2021). “Bureaucratic Routes to Migration: Migrants’ Lived Experience of Paperwork, Clerks and Other Immigration Intermediaries”, University of Victoria
Cunningham, J. (2017), “Rhetorical Tension in Bureaucratic University”, University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Graeber, D. (2015) The utopia of rules: On technology, stupidity, and the secret joys of bureaucracy. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing
Hayles, N. K. (2002) Writing Machines. London, England: MIT Press.
Introduction days (2021) Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. Available at: https://www.rotterdamuas.com/study-information/practical-information/international-introduction-days/Tuberculosis-test/ (Accessed: April 8, 2024).
Keshavarz, M. (2016) Design-Politics: An Inquiry into Passports, Camps and Borders. Malmö University, Faculty of Culture and Society.
Khosravi, S. (2010) “illegal” traveller: An auto-ethnography of borders. 2010th ed. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Khosravi, S. (ed.) (2021) Waiting - A Project in Conversation. transcript Verlag.
M’charek, A. (2020) “Harraga: Burning borders, navigating colonialism,” The sociological review, 68(2), pp. 418–434. doi: 10.1177/0038026120905491.
Malichudis, S. (2020) How the Aegean islands became a warehouse of souls, Solomon. Available at: https://wearesolomon.com/mag/focus-area/migration/how-the-aegean-islands-became-a-warehouse-of-souls/ (Accessed: April 7, 2024).
McKittrick, K. (2021) Dear science and other stories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Mouffe, C. (2008) ‘Art and Democracy: Art as an Agonistic Internvention’. Open:14 Art as a Public Issue, No.14 (2008), p.4
Pater, R. (2021) Caps lock: How capitalism took hold of graphic design, and how to escape from it. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Valiz.
Picozza, F. (2021). The coloniality of asylum : mobility, autonomy and solidarity in the wake of Europe’s refugee crisis. London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
## references
Agamben, G. (2000) Means without end: Notes on politics. Minneapolis, 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: https://english.defensie.nl/topics/border-controls
Borelli, C., Poy, A., and Rué, A. (2023). "Governing Asylum without 'Being There': Ghost Bureaucracy, Outsourcing, and the Unreachability of the State." *Social Sciences*, 12(3), 169. [DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12030169]
Butler, J. (1997) Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. London, England: Routledge.
Cretton, V., Geoffrion, K. (2021). “Bureaucratic Routes to Migration: Migrants’ Lived Experience of Paperwork, Clerks and Other Immigration Intermediaries”, University of Victoria
Cunningham, J. (2017), “Rhetorical Tension in Bureaucratic University”, University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Graeber, D. (2015) The utopia of rules: On technology, stupidity, and the secret joys of bureaucracy. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing
Hayles, N. K. (2002) Writing Machines. London, England: MIT Press.
Introduction days (2021) Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. Available at: https://www.rotterdamuas.com/study-information/practical-information/international-introduction-days/Tuberculosis-test/ (Accessed: April 8, 2024).
Keshavarz, M. (2016) Design-Politics: An Inquiry into Passports, Camps and Borders. Malmö University, Faculty of Culture and Society.
Khosravi, S. (2010) “illegal” traveller: An auto-ethnography of borders. 2010th ed. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Khosravi, S. (ed.) (2021) Waiting - A Project in Conversation. transcript Verlag.
M’charek, A. (2020) “Harraga: Burning borders, navigating colonialism,” The sociological review, 68(2), pp. 418–434. doi: 10.1177/0038026120905491.
Malichudis, S. (2020) How the Aegean islands became a warehouse of souls, Solomon. Available at: https://wearesolomon.com/mag/focus-area/migration/how-the-aegean-islands-became-a-warehouse-of-souls/ (Accessed: April 7, 2024).
McKittrick, K. (2021) Dear science and other stories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Mouffe, C. (2008) ‘Art and Democracy: Art as an Agonistic Internvention’. Open:14 Art as a Public Issue, No.14 (2008), p.4
Pater, R. (2021) Caps lock: How capitalism took hold of graphic design, and how to escape from it. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Valiz.
Picozza, F. (2021). The coloniality of asylum : mobility, autonomy and solidarity in the wake of Europe’s refugee crisis. London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
