Talking Documents

This project appeared as a need to explore potential bureaucratic dramaturgies within the educational institution I was part of 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 - my eviction on the 31st of January 2024 - made central my personal struggles which then unfolded in parallel with the making period. I ended up conducting accidental auto-ethnography as the project was dynamically reshaped due to the material constraints of a bureaucratic timeline.

Talking Documents are performative bureaucratic text inspections that intend to create temporal public interventions through performative readings. I utilised the paperwork interface of my smaller-scale story in order to unravel and foreground questions related to the role of bureaucracy as a less material border and as a regulatory mechanism reflecting narratives, ideologies, policies.

A central element of this project is a seven-act scenario that constructs my personal paperwork story, unravelling 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 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 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 artefacts 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 for 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, the Art Meets Radical Openness Festival in Linz, the City Hall of Rotterdam where I invited people to perform the play together, like a tiny theatre.

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 turning individual administrative cases into public ones. How are the inscribed words in the documents not descriptive but on the contrary “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.