<p>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 bureaucratic 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.</p>
<p>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 to my eviction. I ended up conducting accidentally auto-ethnography as the project was dynamically being reshaped due to the material constraints of the bureaucratic timeline.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. The collective readings of these scenarios introduce an instant publishing method and a communal tool of inspecting bureaucratic bordering infrastructures. I organized a series of performative readings in different (institutional) contexts, public and semi-public like 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.</p>
<p>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 instrumentalised in getting things done” (Butler,1997). Words as active agents. Bodies as low-tech “human microphones”.</p>
<p>A tiny website holds the vocal archive of the different recordings and soundscapes from these public moments published in the graduation exhibition of XPUB in June 2024. </p>
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<divid='about-student'>ada (just ada please) sometimes calls herself a designer and illustrator, sometimes a writer, sometimes a pastry chef. Mostly she calls her friends </div>
<p><em>ada (just ada please) sometimes calls herself a designer and illustrator, sometimes a writer, sometimes a pastry chef. Mostly she calls her friends </em></p><br>
I made this play for you. It is a question, for us to hold together.
Is all intimacy about bodies? What is it about our bodies that makes intimacy? What happens when our bodies distance intimacy from us? This small anthology of poems and short stories lives with these questions—about having a body without intimacy and intimacy without a body. This project is also a homage to everyone who has come before and alongside me, sharing their vulnerability and emotions on the Internet. I called the places where these things happen backplaces. They are small, tender online rooms where people experiencing societally uncomfortable pain can find relief, ease, and transcendence.
I made three backplaces for you to see, click, and feel: Solar Sibling, Hermit Fantasy, and Cake Intimacies. Each of these is the result of its own unique performance or project. Some of the stories I will share carry memories of pain—both physical and emotional. As you sit in the audience, know I am with you, holding your hand through each scene. If the performance feels overwhelming at any point, you have my full permission to step out, take a break, or leave. This is not choreographed, and I care deeply for you.
This is the Index, the stage of my play. Each felted item is an act.
This is the Index, the stage of my play. Each felted item is an act.
Solar Sibling is an online performance of shared loss about leaving and siblings. This project used comments people left on TikTok poetry. I extracted the emotions from these comments, mixed them with my own, and crafted them into poems. It is an ongoing performance, ending only when your feelings are secretly whispered to me. When you do, by typing into the comment box, your feelings are sent to me and the first act closes as the sun rises.
Hermit Fantasy is a short story about a bot who wants to be a hermit. Inspired by an email response from a survey I conducted about receiving emotional support on the Internet, this story explores the contradiction of being online while wanting to disconnect. As an act it’s a series of letters, click by click.
Cake Intimacies is a performance that took a year to bring together. It is a small selection of stories people told me and I held to memory and rewrote here. The stories come from two performances I hosted. First, I asked participants to eat cake, sitting facing or away from each other and sharing their stories about cake and the Internet. The second performance was hosted at the Art Meets Radical Openness Festival, as part of the Turning of the Internet workshop. For this performance, I predicted participants’ future lives on the Internet using felted archetypes and received stories from their Internet past in return. Now the stories are here, each of them a cake with a filling that tells a story, merging the bodily with the digital and making a mess of it all.
The play ends as all plays do. The curtains close, the website stays but the stories will never sound the same. For the final act, I give you the stories. It’s one last game, one last joke to ask my question again. Digital intimacies about the digital, our bodies and the cakes we eat. For the last act, I ask you to eat digital stories. To eat a comment, to eat a digital intimacy. Sharing an act of physical intimacy with yourself and with me, by eating sweets together. Sweets about digital intimacies that never had a body. There is no moral, no bow to wrap the story in. A great big mess of transcendence into the digital, of intimacy and of bodies. The way it always is. Thankfully.
these dreams together, to unite our experiences. Online I have made <a
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<figure>
<imgsrc="keyboard24.jpeg"
alt="Keyboard of things designers have said. Our feelings about work." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">Keyboard of things designers have said.
Our feelings about work.</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<imgsrc="keyboard25.jpeg"
alt="The messages on the keys were gathered using experimental interview methods and questions." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">The messages on the keys were gathered
using experimental interview methods and questions.</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<imgsrc="keyboard26.jpeg"
alt="Except “it’s ok”: my brother said that to me on the phone one day." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">Except “it’s ok”: my brother said that to
me on the phone one day.</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<imgsrc="peecee.jpg"class="desaturate"
alt="Re-enacting dreams about work at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">Re-enacting dreams about work at Piet
Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<imgsrc="amro.jpeg"class="desaturate"
alt="Collective dream re-enactment at Art Meets Radical Openness, Linz." />
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">Collective dream re-enactment at Art
Meets Radical Openness, Linz.</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<imgsrc="dizzy.jpeg"alt="Where do dreams come from?"/>
<figcaptionaria-hidden="true">Where do dreams come from?</figcaption>
