Performing Human Rights: Artistic Interventions Into European Asylum 0367626845, 9780367626846

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Performing Human Rights

This book enhances critical perspectives on human rights through the lens of performance studies and argues that contemporary artistic interventions can contribute to our understanding of human rights as a critical and embodied doing. This study is situated in the contemporary discourse of asylum and political art practices. It argues for the need to reimagine human rights as performative and embodied forms of recognition and practical honouring of our shared vulnerability and co-dependency. It contributes to the debate of theatre and migration, by understanding that contemporary asylum issues are complex and context specific, and that they do not only pertain to the refugee, migrant, asylum seeker or stateless person but also to privileged constituencies, institutional structures, forms of organisation and assembly. The book presents a unique mixed-methods approach that focuses equally on performance analyses and on political philosophy, critical legal studies and art history – and thus speaks to a range of politically interested scholars in all four fields. Anika Marschall works as assistant professor in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, where she teaches in the MA Contemporary Theatre, Dance and Dramaturgy and the BA Media and Culture.

Routledge Series in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Theatre and Performance Series Editor – Brenda Foley

The Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) book series is an interdisciplinary forum for exploring diverse identities, concepts, practices, and people in theatre and performance. Through the series, the Theatre and Performance division at Routledge aims to expand its current offerings, in response to an overwhelming call to action by participants in the field. The new series ref lects both a structure and an ethos, cutting across existing Routledge categories of theatrical production, theatre studies, and research monographs as a means to increase visibility and address the historical exclusion of marginalized voices. The EDI series’ commitment to diversity includes—but also extends beyond— that which we know to be lacking in the field of theatre and performance. We welcome proposals that expand our perspectives and that of the field and look forward to reading your submissions. Out of Time? Temporality in Disability Performance Elena Backhausen, Benjamin Wihstutz, Noa Winter Dancing Motherhood Ali Duffy The Loss of Small White Clouds Dementia in Contemporary Performance Morgan Batch Performing Human Rights Artistic Interventions into European Asylum Anika Marschall For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Series-in-Equity-Diversity-and-Inclusion-in-Theatreand-Performance/book-series/EDI

Performing Human Rights Artistic Interventions into European Asylum

Anika Marschall

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Anika Marschall The right of Anika Marschall to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9780367626846 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367626877 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003110293 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003110293 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction

vii ix 1

1

Human rights and European bordering

21

2

The Centre for Political Beauty

42

3

Human rights and the politics of listening

64

4

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

88

5

Human rights and institutional imagination

115

6

New World Summit: envisioning statelessness

144

We have work to do: commitment to a healing labour

169

Bibliography Index

181 197

Figures

I.1 LEIBNIZ, The Book of Blood, Santiago de Chile, 2008. Courtesy the artists. © Fabrizio Di Carlo 2.1 Centre for Political Beauty, Die Toten Kommen, Friedhof Berlin-Gatow, Germany, 2015. Courtesy the artists. © Nick Jaussi 3.1 Monica Ross, Anniversary, British Library, London. 2008. Courtesy of Monica Ross Estate. © Alex Delfanne 4.1 L  awrence Abu Hamdan, Conflicted Phonemes, 2012. Exhibition view Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, 2019. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Schenkung Baloise Group, Mathis Völzke. © Lawrence Abu Hamdan 4.2 Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Conflicted Phonemes, detail, 2012. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London. © Lawrence Abu Hamdan 4.3 Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Conflicted Phonemes, detail, 2012. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London. © Lawrence Abu Hamdan 5.1 Hannes Kötter and Daniel Seidl, RECHT. Ökonomien des Handelns 2, Mousonturm Frankfurt. 2015. Courtesy the artists 6.1 Democratic Self-administration of Rojava and Studio Jonas Staal, New World Summit – Rojava. 2015–2018. Courtesy the artists. © Ruben Hamelink

2 54 67

93 96 97 116 157

Acknowledgements

I imagine that no book was ever written by one author alone. While thinking, discussing, writing and rewriting I have been supported and inspired by a number of brilliant people and their creativity and care. I am grateful to Laura Hussey at Routledge for inviting me to this publication journey and to Swatti Hindwan for her positive support throughout. Thank you also to the invaluable reader Dr Kirsty Kay. I would like to thank very much indeed the artists, whose work has invigorated this book in the first place, and those who have generously given permission for the inclusion of images within this book: Helen Spackman and Ernst Fischer, the Centre for Political Beauty, Tania Bruguera, the Monica Ross foundation, Alice Ross and Bernard G. Mills, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Daniel Kötter and Hannes Seidl, Andrea Fraser, Akira Takayama and Jonas Staal. You make us reimagine the world, change it and ourselves for the better. A considerable amount of research towards this book was undertaken during my time at the University of Glasgow. To Professor Alison Phipps, Dr Michael Bachmann and Professor Anselm Heinrich, thank you for your generous supervision throughout this research journey. Your compassion, encouragement, trust and humour have guided and enthused me along the way. I am grateful to each of you for helping me develop as researcher, collaborator and human being. This research would not have been possible without the support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the College of Arts, University of Glasgow for my doctoral research. Thank you to the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities for all their training opportunities, a council for all matters related to broadening my intellectual and creative horizon, and for making me fall in love with Scotland. Thank you to the generous and welcoming community of the Glasgow Refugee Asylum and Migration Network, which has nurtured me with new insights and ref lection and gently kept on pushing me out of my discipline-based comfort zone. The book developed further thanks to the thoughtful support I received from colleagues and friends in the departments of Dramaturgy and Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University and would not have been possible without the Aarhus University Forskningsfond (AUFF-E-2019-7-8). I am especially

x Acknowledgements

grateful for my brilliant colleague, mentor and friend Professor Peter Boenisch and the dear Lise Sofie Houe for extraordinary encouragement and recognition, for always being ready to think with and imagine theatre anew with me. Gratitude to the wonderful and inspiring Dr Daniela Agostinho and Dr Trine Friis Sørensen and members of my international community in Aarhus, who have contributed a home base over the subsequent years of finishing this book. Gratitude to Professor Silvija Jestrović, Professor Yana Meerzon, Professor Liz Tomlin, Professor Vicky Angelaki, Dr Emma Cox, Dr Cristina Delgado and Dr Marilena Zaroulia for making my research journey since the humble start as a PhD candidate a wonderful, critical and challenging experience. I am grateful for your comradeship and belief in my work, for your intellectual generosity, integrity and wisdom. I am so humbled to have been welcomed into the academic community and to research and think and work with you. A love-filled thank you to ambitious, beautiful, loving friends and meaningful support from the Neue Kritische Theaterwissenschaft network: Dr Lisa Skwirblies, Dr Ann-Christine Simke and Dr Azadeh Sharifi – together we open new, unforeseen doors of imagination and enlivening discussions within a life-giving framework of anti-racist scholarship. Finally, I would like to thank Anna Maria Jurisch, Dr Angela Rawlings, Dr Helene Grøn, Dr Andy Henry and Dr Viviana Checchia. Your love and friendship and our making of kin across different worlds and continents mean worlds to me. Thank you to my home team, who brings me joy, believes in me and cares for me, always: Mama, Jan, Papa, Birte, Niklas, Charlotte, Friedrich. Robert, you humble master of patience, here is to many more years of championing politics, feminisms and home-making together. Parts of the introduction to Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s work in Chapter 4 appeared originally as “To Speak the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth – About Political Performances of Listening”, Platform: Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts 11.1 (2017): 67–87, and are reprinted with the kind permission of Platform. Brief analytic parts about the notion of commitment, temporality and hope in Chapters 5 and 6 appeared originally in somewhat different forms in the articles “What can Theatre do about the Refugee Crisis? Enacting Commitment and Navigating Complicity in Performative Interventions”, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 23.2 (2018): 148–116, as well as “Between Tokyo and Frankfurt: Akira Takayama’s ‘Theatre 2.0’, Migratory Encounters and Urban Solidarity in the Contemporary City”, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 26.1 (2020): 205–223, and they are reprinted with the kind permission of Taylor & Francis.

Introduction

What’s in a drop of blood? In one drop of human blood, we find millions of cells, and we find life. Whether we see fake blood on stage or real blood elsewhere in the everyday, we see life and imagine the bodies of others in visceral, imaginative proximity to our own – no matter the physical or geographical distance, racial, sexual or gendered differences. Have you donated blood before? Has someone asked you to donate your blood? Has someone donated their blood to you? Have you asked someone to donate their blood to you? In the durable performance project The Book of Blood: Human Writes (2006–), the white British artists Ernst Fischer and Helen Spackman ask audience members to donate their blood in order to write the English version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) with it, letter by letter, 6,773 in total. If audience members seek to volunteer, they need to give informed and written consent while a performance helper sits down with each of them individually, goes through the consent form and explains the process. By donating blood, participants continue to co-create and sustain the performance. A nurse sits at a long table in the performance space, the table is decorated with candles or red roses and a white or red cloth. She wears a white doctor’s coat, latex gloves and nameplate; in front of her, we see tissues, a sterilised pricking instrument, disinfectant, cotton balls and plasters. The nurse gently takes the hand of each volunteer, sits opposite them and carefully extracts a drop of blood off their fingertips, all under sterile conditions. Every blood drop, buzzing with life, is smeared in its own small, white porcelain bowl, which is neatly placed next to others around the table. Next to the nurse sits a calligrapher, nib in hand, who mixes red ink into the drop of blood and writes a single letter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) into a handmade book bound in red silk. One drop of blood per letter, the book travels with the performance project from venue to venue. Spackman and Fischer are co-founders of the Leibniz live art collective, they initiated the performance project The Book of Blood in 2006 and have

DOI: 10.4324/9781003110293-1

2 Introduction

presented it at international performance festivals in Chile, Denmark, Greece, Finland, Italy, Sweden and the UK. According to the artists, “[t]his action is designed to serve as a pro-active ritual of commemoration, observance and co-commitment to the realization of fundamental human rights in our everyday lives” (Leibniz cited in Mooney 2014a, 483). This performance, even if watched as a recording, rather than experienced in the f lesh, is visceral. I agree with Annabelle Mooney, to whom “[t]here is something earthly and sublime” (Mooney 2014a, 484) about the performance. The Book of Blood fills the weighty and sometimes abstract text about human rights with life, it draws a connection between human rights and all our bodies, those who came before bleeding, as well as those to come. In Mooney’s words Blood allows a way of imagining a body at the limits of representation. Blood also allows for a very inclusive understanding of relations with other people, as while blood points to a body, without scientific analysis of the blood, it is impossible to say anything about what this body looks like. The body that blood as a substance indexes is not a particular body but any body. (Mooney 2014a, 487)

Figure I.1 LEIBNIZ, The Book of Blood, Santiago de Chile, 2008. Courtesy the artists. © Fabrizio Di Carlo.

Introduction  3

Thus, The Book of Blood intimately offers blood as a response to the search for a shared commonality of humanity – reaching beyond historical, violent, heteropatriarchal and colonial fantasies of Man (Wynter 2003). The performance invites us to feel, know and live rather than think differently about the commonality, temporality and long history of human (rights). As The Book of Blood shows, a philosophical exercise of human rights cannot be enough because it is necessary to engage law and make use of existing rights to generate performative moments of rupture, which can confront or generate new rights. Indeed, as Mooney has observed, “[i]t seems that we are not yet at home with human rights” (Mooney 2014b, 3). Therefore, a performative engagement with human rights arguably unlocks human rights’ radical political potential. Human rights have emerged as a core concern in the twenty-first century for many artists who seek to tackle the conditions which threaten the political and material lives of people, in particular, displaced people. Asking what theatre contributes to our understanding of human rights, this book traces, analyses and theorises contemporary artistic interventions into the perilous European asylum system. I examine how artists have responded to the complex range of urgent political issues when it comes to the question of asylum, including the perilous moments of border crossing and arrival, the legal procedures of asylum-seeking processes and the wider notion of statelessness. The case studies in this book include performative interventions by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, the German performance collective Centre for Political Beauty, the British artist Monica Ross, the British-Lebanese sound artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan (who is affiliated with the research agency Forensic Architecture), the US-American performance artist Andrea Fraser, the Japanese theatre maker Akira Takayama and the Dutch visual artist Jonas Staal and his collaboration with the Kurdish Women’s Movement. These case studies focus on the interplay between ethics and aesthetics in contemporary art practices, and those which call their audiences to political action. The leading research questions for me are therefore: How do contemporary artistic interventions ref lect, challenge and shape the understanding and enactment of human rights? What is mobilised when artistic interventions probe political and legal boundaries? And how do such interventions foster solidarity while also addressing boundaries of citizenship, notions of cultural belonging and geopolitical divides, all of which often hinder the advancement of social justice? Scholarly work on performance and asylum today spans a wide geographical range, includes manifold artistic practices, and puts the field of theatre studies in dialogue with trauma studies and political philosophy. While some artists and scholars have revealed and critiqued the ongoing racialisation of refugees, some have been complicit in it. Most are part of wider socio-political attempts to reconcile traditions of hospitality and to maintain a “narrative of liberal, human rights-driven hospitality” (Cox and Zaroulia 2016, 142). This human rights narrative forms the node at which my analyses intersect, because – as I

4 Introduction

will show – an imaginative understanding of rights mobilises the emancipatory, generative core which lurks in the concept of human rights. This book engages with contemporary artistic interventions which address transnational societies at large rather than distinct local communities. These artworks negotiate their ongoing complicity in the geopolitical nexus of asylum, migration and human rights and make informed use of the politicolegal means at their privileged disposal. By drawing on different aesthetics, they expose the painful shortcomings and violence of political institutions, but without adopting a wholly anti-statist position. Furthermore, the contemporary artistic interventions move outside the institution of the theatre and blur the boundaries between the artistic, political and legal realms. My particular focus is upon interventions which respond to the so-called refugee crisis in Europe since 2015, and which are inherently driven by their creators’ intricate knowledge of law and legal procedures. This book analyses artistic interventions with the aim to challenge our understanding of human rights by engaging with aesthetics and political decision-making processes. They seek to effect long-term structural change, abolition or decolonisation of social, political and artistic institutions; as I show, some interventions do this more sustainably than others, some are more ethically troubling than others and some are more complicit than others with racialisation, narratives of victimhood and white saviourism. I research, think, write, bleed and engage in political action, from my positionality as white, cis-female, able-bodied, heterosexual, (at the time of writing) 30-year-old European citizen, which grants me intersecting structural advantages and at the same time, forecloses certain modes of solidarity, being-with and empathy. Making my hegemonic positionality explicit, I hope to demonstrate in this book that sustained political engagement in the arts helps us to envision pathways towards meaningful solidarity by nurturing political commitment and a determination to fight discrimination, exclusion and marginalisation.

Performing in an age of rights The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been described as “an age of rights” (Bobbio 1996, 43). Central to this age of rights is the institutional implementation of human rights through the United Nations (UN), as well as the practice of claiming and debating rights in everyday social life: human rights is “the lingua franca of global moral thought” (Ignatieff 2001, 53). More recently, in light of immigration detention, deportation and refugee encampment, the notion of “rightlessness” has been critically introduced as an inherent but problematic part of this age of rights (Gündoğdu 2015). This section will introduce the idea of human rights and its critique, laying the groundwork for an examination of new rights claims made by artists in response to the struggles of refugees, asylum seekers and stateless people in their respective political context.

Introduction  5

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Global Trends report, the years between 2010 and 2019 have been termed the “Decade of Displacement”, which saw at least 100 million people forced to f lee their homes, seeking refuge either as internationally displaced or outside the borders of their country (UNHCR 2019, 6). We have seen a war in Syria, which broke out in 2011 and continues today, a war in Ukraine, a war in Yemen, a displacement crisis in South Sudan as well as in Ethiopia, the climate crisis endangering communities in the Sahel region, people f leeing conditions in Venezuela and elsewhere. This global increase in people f leeing and seeking refuge in Europe in particular has resulted in the severe criminalisation of different modes of international movement. Moreover, we have witnessed the closure, reinforcement and extension of borders across Europe. The European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) was created in 2005 to oversee border control around the entire European Union. This organisation – which enforces political violence by means of deportation, detention and discrimination, instead of safeguarding human rights – forms a pernicious pillar in the perilous European asylum system. The right to leave one’s own country, the right to nationality and the right to seek and enjoy asylum from persecution are written into the UDHR, and as such are a fairly young and highly contested concept. The UDHR encompasses a preamble and thirty articles, and it was only signed in 1948 by the UN General Assembly, in the aftermath of World War II. The UDHR, unlike a petition, dissolves existing political authority, making human rights f low from the nature of human beings themselves, rather than from a written contract between sovereign and people. The UDHR is the result of a long process of textual labour and political negotiation regarding the articles’ exact wording. Human rights are embedded at international, regional and local levels through a plethora of formal and informal treaties, along with legal, political, traditional and customary instruments and mechanisms. Human rights sit at the crossroads of all societal realms, including security, education and the environment. Manifold organisations, professional bodies and people are involved in their promotion, protection and monitoring, including nationstates, the UN, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), multinational corporations and private actors. The protection and promotion of human rights are impeded by factors including a dearth of transnational collaboration, tensions between economic and social interests, and a wider lack of awareness about available legal means. However, nation-states are no longer the sole duty-bearers with regards to the maintenance of human rights (Mihr and Gibney 2014, xxxi). Artistic practices contribute to our understanding of human rights on different societal levels and through different means of civic engagement. Crucially, these practices underline our human co-dependency relationality, and shared responsibilities in the promotion and protection of human rights.

6 Introduction

Human rights are thought of to be universal, inalienable and indivisible. They are supposed to be inherent to all human beings regardless of nationality, religious belief or language, and yet, have historical roots in the Eurocentric Enlightenment. All three elements of human rights – universality, inalienability and indivisibility – are continuously contested in political theory, legal studies and other spheres both within and beyond academia. Feminist and post-colonial thinkers such as Ariella Azoulay (2015), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2005), Ratna Kapur (2005), Étienne Balibar (2004) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos and César A. Rodríguez-Garavito (2005) challenge the fundamental presumption of human rights’ universality: Who is regarded and constituted as the rights-bearer? How do human rights perpetuate imperialist systems of knowledge, capitalist power dynamics, or a Eurocentric bias? Attempts to affirmatively reclaim and embody human rights need to take into account criticisms of the UDHR which emphasise its colonialist elements. Rachel Withers (2014) has shown, in the context of Monica Ross’s performance work (see Chapter 4), that the secular framework of the declaration has inevitably generated controversy and rendered it unacceptable to some. For example, in 1948 Saudi Arabia refused to ratify it on the basis that it conf licted with Sharia law. Objections other than religious ones include assertions that the declaration is both Western-centric and anti-feminist; the legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon (2006) has taken issue with its use of universal masculine pronouns, for instance. Amnesty International has argued that the declaration is incomplete without the inclusion of a right to refuse to kill, and although this right is alluded to in other UN documents, it has yet to appear in the declaration itself (Amnesty International 2014). Critically and bodily attuned understandings of human rights need to reach beyond predominant practices of human rights, which are dependent upon political infrastructures and the framework of nation-states. Artistic interventions can contest discriminatory practices and the structural violence of the body politic, recognising that these phenomena arise from intersecting racial, gendered, socio-economic and citizenship privileges. As I will demonstrate, such interventions contest the assumption that the legal body of public international law can only be effectively interpreted by institutional experts on human rights. Crucially, I argue that performing human rights in the artistic realm creates new moral, political and cultural agents, who take part in the interpretation, negotiation, dissemination and transformation of human rights, and who, in doing so, ultimately make the act of claiming rights possible in the first place. The bodily frailty and co-dependency of all human beings need to be acknowledged in any contemporary and future thinking about rights, freedoms and responsibilities. Juxtaposing lived experiences and the equivocal language of the abstract “man and citizen” in the declaration, Costas Douzinas shows that the subject […] appears as someone who is born in freedom and equality and enjoys a list of abstract entitlements. He [sic] is a person without

Introduction  7

history or tradition, gender, colour or religion, needs and desires […], a non-social moral being. (Douzinas 2007, 93) Returning to the question of who or what is the subject of the law, Sara Ahmed moves towards the body to contest rights discourse which forgets about lived experience, because bodies are never simply and literally bodies, they are always inscribed within a system of value differentiation, they are gendered, coloured or racially marked, they have weight, height, age, they may be healthy or unhealthy, they may be able bodied or disabled. (Ahmed 1995, 56) Indeed, rights can be differently mobilised, as I will show throughout the book, because rights are “relationships not things, they are institutionally defined rules specifying what people can do in relation to one another. Rights refer to doing rather than having, to social relationships that enable or constrain action” (Iris Marian Young, cited in Ahmed 1995, 64).

Calls for action: performing human rights The concept of human rights has been problematised because of its abstract universality, which seems to go against the particularity of individual human beings and the specificity of rights violations. Critical theorists have argued that human rights tend to de-politicise political conf licts because of their generalisability, and their universal legal form. Inf luential critiques include “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” by Jacques Rancière (2004), “Against Human Rights” by Slavoj Žižek (2005) and “Beyond Human Rights” by Giorgio Agamben (2008). All three texts give prominence to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the stateless condition: the paradox that when nation-states are considered to be the institutional guarantor of inalienable human rights, they in fact produce the question of refugees and rightlessness because they necessarily create groups without citizenship, political agency or “the right to have rights” (Arendt 1986, 296–297). In my understanding, Arendt shows that it is exactly when people enact the rights they do not have that they reclaim their political agency. Human rights constitute an abstract yet clearly articulated ethical code and encompass an openness to different possible meanings. The right to equality, for example, highlights the performative vigour of human rights: it clearly does not describe the status quo but an ideal, and thus calls for action. My aim is to understand human rights as something continuously performed. I therefore insist upon the performativity of human rights: they are not simply a given, something which is at hand when needed, but are instead a doing which brings about the subject of human rights itself. Part of the

8 Introduction

inherently ambiguous nature of human rights derives from the fact that they are performative in the sense of J. L. Austin’s speech act theory (Austin 1976). In linguistics, a saying can also be a doing: bringing that which is described into being, as in “I sentence you to”, or “I declare”. Indeed, the preamble of the UDHR literally requires a continuous enactment and reiteration, rather than presenting a definitive all-encompassing means to an end. The General Assembly closes the preamble by proclaiming it to be a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms. (United Nations n.d.) Accordingly, performing human rights means a durational process, a continuous social and imaginative practice of negotiation and interpretation, without a specific beginning, middle and end (McNeilly 2018). Theatre and performance studies compel us to rethink human rights as a continuous call to both political and creative action. Understanding human rights as a call to creative action means a social, imaginative and critical engagement with their shortcomings, their potential and their legal-political form, rather than a more literal performing on the proscenium stage. Indeed, I contend that the arts, as a realm ripe with political and legal potential, is distinctively capable of performing human rights. However, there is nothing essentially political about artistic practices in general – which is precisely why performing human rights necessitates an intricate engagement with politics, law, nation-states, coloniality, institutional racism, citizenship and borders violence. This book examines political artworks which go far beyond conventional theatre stages and texts, entering “corridors of power and courtrooms” (Derbyshire and Hodson 2008, 191). However, when it comes to scholarship, as Michael Freeman has noted, “human-rights talk is ubiquitous, but humanrights study is still predominantly legalistic” (Freeman 2006, 52–53). Recent examples of artistic interventions have compelled me to examine what theatre can do in the face of contemporary socio-political and legal injustice against refugees, asylum seekers and stateless people. Arguably, the rise in refugees and asylum seekers in Europe since 2015, as well as the plethora of global justice movements since the 2010s, has produced and will continue to produce a different kind of politically engaged or enraged art, envisioning or enacting institutional change. A growing number of theatre and performance studies scholarship, particularly in the field of applied theatre, looks at human rights and social justice in different social, geographical and historical contexts (Becker, Hernández and Werth 2013; Cole 2010; Madison 2010; Morin and Luckhurst 2015; Thompson 2012, 2014). In 2009, Paul Rae published Theatre and Human Rights,

Introduction  9

which gives an overview of the manifold practitioners and phenomena that colour the relationship between theatre and human rights: From the thematic treatment of human rights issues in plays, to activist and participatory performances with explicit human rights agendas; from theatre-makers playing an advocacy role as public intellectuals and civil society actors, to performances that challenge human rights norms, to theatre itself coming under threat from human rights abuses; from theatre aesthetics echoing the formal legal and political context within which human rights law is enacted and challenged, to the theatricality queasily inherent in some of the most iconic and widely publicised human rights violations of recent years. (Rae 2009, 1–2) From the outset, Rae stresses that theatre can address human rights as a subject and argues that theatre itself can become a matter of freedom of expression. Indeed, he juxtaposes famous international playwrights who enjoy freedom of expression and mobility with figures who have endured exile, detention and other forms of violence because of their artistic and political position, such as the members of the Belarus Free Theatre (Rae 2009, 12). Theatre makers have played a progressive role in wider civil activist movements, as in the case of Augusto Boal’s radical theatre models of collective action (Boal 1998, 2008). The wide-ranging genre of documentary, testimonial and tribunal theatre seeks to give voice to marginalised, oppressed and violated people through the use of source material from legal proceedings: examples include Peter Weiss’s The Investigation, about the Auschwitz atrocities; Richard Norton-Taylor’s The Colour of Justice, about the racially motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence; and Alan Rickman’s My Name is Rachel Corrie, about the murder of a peace activist in the Gaza Strip. Only recently in 2021, the Bard College opened the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts to research and educate graduate students on the intersection between arts and human rights, which demonstrates an awareness for the importance of knowledge production on matters of human rights and art. Rae argues that theatre has an intricate relation to law; it can involve supplementing the work of the law, and even acting as a temporary stand-in where legal provisions fall short. But it can also perform a more critical and sceptical function, drawing audiences back to aspects of the relationship between rights and responsibilities that are less easily adjudicated, particularly where theatricality may be an inherent part of the judicial process. (Rae 2009, 51) Theatre and performance can be particularly effective at promoting and addressing human rights, because human rights are inherently contradictory

10 Introduction

and “messy” (Rae 2009, 40) in spite of, or rather because of, their precise and abstract designation. For this reason, Rae aims to use a knowledge of theatre and performance to “understand what human rights mean and what holding them entails” (Rae 2009, 40). Theatre and performance studies provide a perspective that is simultaneously critical and hopeful, a practice-centred understanding of human rights, which includes both the interrogation of actual conditions and the envisioning of alternatives. Throughout the book, I discuss artistic interventions which operate from a problematic position of white Eurocentric bias, and which are located within centres of former imperial power. From this privileged position, the case studies intervene in sometimes highly specialised rights discourses, seek new ways to perform solidarity and advocate for transnational justice. Through  navigating the fields of arts, politics and law, and posing uneasy questions and images of border management, the right to asylum, political agency and representation, they raise a plethora of problematic ethical and political issues.

Terminology: refugees, asylum and migration Words perform. Language and terminology can be powerful instruments with which to protect and enforce one’s rights – and equally to discriminate against, oppress and hurt others. With my focus on the perilous European asylum system, words can make crucial differences in terms of what kind of life one might be allowed to pursue. Once granted, the legal category of refugee makes a huge difference for the subject, in comparison to categories like undocumented or illegal immigrant, sans papiers, stateless person or asylum seeker. At times, these terms seem to have become a vernacular, a rhetorical commodity, rather than a political call for action. They have arguably become mere declarative references, masking the need to bring about conditions that would allow for human rights to be otherwise enacted. I will return to this “non-performativity” (Ahmed 2006) in Chapter 6. For now, I stress the crucial differences in terminology with regards to refugees, asylum and migration. Remaining vigilant about the prevalent juridical understanding of stateless people, I make use of these different terms – refugees, asylum seekers, migrants and stateless people – throughout the book. In order to approach the subject matter in a dignifying way, my usage does not always align with court decisions on the status of the people in question, but rather with their self-understanding. From my lived experience as white, cis-gendered migrant with European citizenship and many structural advantages, the term “migrant” evokes a connection to the socio-economic conditions of international mobility and less impeded forms of border crossing, whereas “refugees” f lee armed conf lict or persecution and cross national borders to seek safety. “Asylum seekers” are those going through the process of legal recognition: people who claim to be refugees, but whose claims have not yet been

Introduction  11

evaluated by the host state. In a nutshell, not every asylum seeker is legally a refugee, but every refugee was initially an asylum seeker. It is important to stress here that many of my friends, colleagues, artists and interlocutors, who have f led their country, reject the term “refugee” and demand to no longer be categorised and caught in this confined political identity only. Hannah Arendt has argued that rightlessness is not a legal problem but a political one, resulting from the exclusion of the stateless from a political community in which their action and speech could otherwise be taken into account (Arendt 1986, 295–297). She makes use of the term “stateless” to describe those who do not benefit from citizenship rights, but who may hold different judicial status: refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants or even citizens facing states of emergency. What they share is a condition of rightlessness, being deprived of legal personhood and human rights. Arendt offers one of the most powerful critiques of human rights, demonstrating that it is precisely most difficult to claim and exercise one’s human rights when stateless. Therefore, she argues, the entitlement to equal human rights is paradoxically bound up with membership in an organised political community. This paradox manifests the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of human rights to become all the more pertinent for the issue of rightlessness, which stubbornly persists in the contemporary European asylum context (Gündoğdu 2015, 2). Although different in juridical status and therefore entailing different sets of rights, refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented immigrants and stateless people find themselves outside the framework of nation-states, outside political structures defined by territorial borders. They are instead caught in “that murky domain between legality and illegality” (Benhabib 2004, 4). Article 14 of the UDHR includes the right to seek asylum; Article 15 forbids states to arbitrarily deprive their citizens of nationality; and the more than 70-year-old Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees recognises several other rights for asylum seekers and refugees, which might not have been more relevant. According to the convention, a refugee is legally defined as someone who owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country. (UNHCR n.d.) International human rights law places a positive duty upon sovereign states and entitles those who are undocumented to be recognised as equal persons before the law; it makes possible their demands to equal social, economic and cultural rights. However, it fails to provide robust guarantees of personhood to asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants who challenge their detention or deportation;

12 Introduction

as a result, their rights remain dependent on highly arbitrary political and legal decisions as well as unreliable sentiments such as compassion. (Gündoğdu 2015, 17) It might be the case that the UNHCR convention does not need a redrafting; rather, it could be argued, what is needed is for countries to abide by it (Cox and Wake 2018). However, what we have witnessed over the last few years is the closing, reinforcement and extension of borders across Europe, including the creation of Frontex, which oversees border control around the entire European Union. These political efforts enforce the deportation of refugees rather than safeguarding their human rights. As Steve Wilmer explains, [b]y blocking the Atlantic Ocean route to Europe, Frontex thereby forced refugees to cross North Africa by land and then to cross the Mediterranean Sea by boat. More recently, Frontex has concentrated on blocking the humanitarian route through the Balkans, and the routes from Turkey to Greece. (Wilmer 2018, 3). Wilmer’s comment, along with Emma Cox and Caroline Wake’s research, demonstrates that scholarly work in the field of performance studies binds the aesthetic as well as the legal and political dimensions of asylum, struggling to comprehend its sheer magnitude and implications upon all of our lives. This shift to the perspective of European arts and scholarship also presents a complicit role in the ongoing racialisation of refugees. As Cox and Wake remind us, the amplified Mediterranean or European crisis occludes the less visible f light of people from South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria and Myanmar, among others. This racialised sustaining of a crisis is highlighted, for example, by the World Bank’s description of Uganda’s 2006 Refugee Act (which allows refugees to work, travel and start their own business) as “one of the most progressive and generous in the world” (Hussein 2017). I contest the idea that an ultimate European perspective on artistic intervention is fixed geographically and historically in the contemporary moment. Crucially, in this book I examine artistic responses to the ethical, political and legal challenges faced by contemporary Europe and address related geopolitical conditions; these currently include ad hoc EU border politics and a fragmenting Schengen Treaty. The idea of a so-called refugee crisis functions as deeply problematic, politicised construct. In politicising the so-called refugee crisis, powerful political, legal and cultural actors and institutions interpenetrate, and they produce “perceptual binary[ies]” as ways of seeing and comprehending refugees, asylum seekers and stateless people “as objects for scrutiny by the non-displaced” (Cox 2017, 481) within wider frameworks of race, migration and (post)colonialism. The perilous European asylum system spans the legal definition and procedure of asylum, politically enforced border

Introduction  13

control and institutional violence, as well as culturally produced images and narratives. Drawing on an imaginary reminiscent of the racialised practices of imperial Europe, this politicisation of crisis, ultimately tells us more about structural dispositions and the self-stylisation of states and institutions than it does about refugees, asylum seekers and stateless people themselves (Cox 2017, 482). Theatre and performance studies provide a lens through which a more nuanced account of this ideology, and the imaginary it produces in the name of human rights, can be presented.

The RISE manifesto for artists seeking to engage with refugees During the peak of the crisis in 2015, Tania Cañas, the arts director of the Australian refugee-led advocacy organisation RISE: Refugees, Survivors, and eX-detainees, published a manifesto comprising ten considerations for non-refugee artists who are looking to work with refugees and asylum seekers (Cañas 2015), which I also consider to be clear ethical guidance for non-refugee researchers such as myself. Since its formation in 2009, RISE has been entirely governed by refugees, asylum seekers and former detainees, and thus provides first-hand knowledge and experience of the difficulties in settling in Australia and expertise regarding the Australian welfare system. Among other services they provide for their members, RISE offers settlement and job seeker support, driving lessons, educational and computer programs, emergency material aid, a food bank, free internet access, a library, events and recreational activities. With this grounding in first-hand and professional experience, RISE works towards changes in asylum law. In 2011, the agency published a submission to Australia’s Immigration Detention Network and the Joint Standing Committee on Migration’s Inquiry into Multiculturalism in Australia. Their motto for good practice in work with refugees and artists is “nothing about us without us”. The RISE manifesto intervenes in the hegemonic whiteness of discourse and methods surrounding participatory, socially engaged art. Theatre makers as well as theatre and performance researchers should always address their own biases, intentions and privileges. According to Cañas, non-refugee artists who aim to collaborate with RISE are required to account for ethico-political issues within their work in terms of participation, privilege, empowerment, representation, safety and neutrality. The RISE manifesto urges non-refugee artists to critically interrogate their own intentions: [o]ur struggle is not an opportunity, or our bodies a currency, by which to build your career. Rather than merely focusing on the ‘other’ (‘where do I find refugees’ etc) subject your own intention to critical, ref lexive analysis. What is your motivation to work with this particular subject matter? Why at this particular time? (Cañas 2015)

14 Introduction

Cañas identifies the problem of bodies being presumed as vulnerable and therefore available for transformation into artistic participants or, more radically speaking, into aesthetic objects, as vessels for stories. She underlines that non-refugee artists who want to collaborate with the organisation often claim that they want to show “the human side of the story”. However, for her, these intentions show “a false sense of neutrality and limited understanding of their own bias, privilege and frameworks” (Cañas 2015). It has become increasingly important to highlight the ethics of research when white, cis-gendered scholars with European citizenship, like myself, work in the field of performance art and migration and engage with refugees and their stories. While much of this research is important and necessary, it can only be so if it addresses questions of intention, privilege and bias (Ahmed 2012; Dreher, Flood and Martin 2013; Phipps 2017). Based on the RISE manifesto, I am committed to unlearning my biases in my work and to ask myself the daily question “Who is my research benefitting today and who is it harming today?”

Chapter structure and methodological approach Positioned within the fast-growing and increasingly expanding body of research on theatre and migration, this book examines interventions by artists in contemporary Europe who respond directly to national and international migration politics, border management, asylum policies and legal procedures. The works examined in this book foreground solidarity and call for political change but do not necessarily maintain an anti-state stance. These interventions are research-led and sophisticated in terms of their politico-legal aspects, but they are also complicit in structures of institutional violence, conditions of rightlessness and statelessness, and the perpetuation of the “perceptual binary that situates refugees as objects for our comprehension” (Cox 2017, 479). My aim is to create a greater and more critically nuanced understanding of the socio-political complexity and racialisation of contemporary asylum issues, and of the performative practices that engage with them, introducing new or expanded aesthetic modes that are elusive and not easily definable. The artistic interventions discussed here are undertaken by artists in different fields – performance, sound, installation and visual art – and span a range of phenomena within the perilous European asylum system. The socio-political complexity of asylum – the vast numbers of people deported, caught in transit, held in detention centres, trapped in violent conf lict zones, and questioned in immigration offices – demands a renewed application of concepts such as sensibility, relationality and collectivity to the typically abstract concept of human rights; theatre and performance studies are well-positioned to respond to this demand. The examples analysed in this study, which present controversial blueprints for building a more just world far beyond conventional theatre stages and institutions, all show the messiness of human rights thought at work. I contend that some rights are pertinent

Introduction  15

to the interventions’ examined approaches to performing human rights: the freedom of movement and the right to asylum of Articles 13 and 14 (Chapters 2 and 3), the freedom of expression and fair treatment before the law of Articles 19 and 7 (Chapters 4 and 5) and the freedom to peaceful assembly and participation in political life of Articles 20 and 21 (Chapters 6 and 7). The book presents six chapters, which explore artistic interventions situated in different political contexts. They each tackle different aspects of performing human rights in contemporary Europe and beyond: the perilous moment of border crossing and (failed) arrival in a host country; the legal procedure of the asylum process and the testimony of biographical narrative; and the recognition and representation of stateless people in international political forums. The chapters locate the question of performing human rights within a wider cultural and philosophical field – from the historical legacies of activist and socially engaged art that have laid the ground for contemporary debates on migratory theatre and diversity in the artworld, to the entry of sound studies and the phenomenology of listening into the critical legal studies movement, and finally to the culture of institutional critique and a performance studies interest in the practice of instituting. With this book, I also seek to pave the way for future intersections between performance studies and critical legal studies. I apply a holistic, mixedmethods approach to the question of human rights, rightlessness and statelessness, which focuses equally on performance analyses as well as on discussions of political philosophy and critical legal studies. This approach is a result of my research journey which, in all cases, began with engaging the practice samples at hand, before turning more theoretically towards the discursive fields they opened up. For all analyses, I have not been present at and always one step removed from the live event of performative unfolding. Therefore, I include methodological ref lections negotiating my distanced perspective as a white, cis-female, able-bodied European citizen, as well as my engagement with the performative material not at hand and its ephemera. The first chapter is prompted by the question “what is to be done then?” in the face of the so-called refugee crisis in Europe since 2015. It maps the critical and practical context that undermines the book’s case studies, which foreground the perilous moment of border crossing by refugees making their way towards Europe. I introduce the book’s specific focus on the so-called refugee crisis and critically question its imagery and geographical embedding in European borders only, in light of continuous colonial legacies and racialisation. Building on this critical context, the second half of the chapter crosses the colonial present of the Atlantic, by examining the artistic intervention Immigrant Movement International (2011–) by Tania Bruguera, which deals in particular with how states systematically fail to fulfil their international legal obligations to human rights. This analysis connects questions of migrant identities and marginalisation, coalition-building across difference, and art activist struggles and claims for human rights with Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the right to have rights” (1986, 296–297).

16 Introduction

The second chapter presents the theatre collective Centre for Political Beauty, their representational practices and dramaturgical strategies. It analyses their artistic intervention The Dead Are Coming from 2015, in which the artists exhumed dead refugee bodies from mass graves, identified them and asked their relatives permission to take them to Berlin for a public burial ceremony. In relation to the case study The Dead Are Coming, the chapter discusses the artist produce legal, political and performative frictions that become productive for addressing issues of human rights and the artistic framing of refugees as grievable subjects. Drawing on the discourse of art activism, the chapter will demonstrate how the staged collective grieving in The Dead Are Coming employs ethically and emotionally risky strategies in which identification remains in question. As the chapter will outline, the performance provoked international media outrage but also created what I call ethical disfluency: an ethical stuttering fuelled by the inability to articulate the ethical matters at stake because of the absence of existing formulas to negotiate the “disconcerting multivalency” (Cox and Zaroulia 2016, 146) of performance art, political assembly and religious ceremony. Ultimately the chapter argues that this performance equips us with a different way of looking at the transnational scale of forced displacement and migration movements. Crucially, it envisions what political performance might mean at more widely dispersed geographical and institutional levels. The third chapter focuses on the relationship between human rights and the act of listening. This perspective approaches the question of human rights by considering the politics of throat and ear, of voice and listening. Listening does not occur in neutral spaces. It can (re)produce power relations, but it also has the potential to engage us in different acts of world-making. The chapter investigates the British artist Monica Ross’s performance rights repeated – an act of memory (2005–2008). In the performance, Ross recites the two-thousandword-long UDHR from memory, article by article. The recital suggests the ways legal language can address people through different embodied means. rights repeated does not only enact freedom of expression and make audiences listen to this political language, to the performer’s inf lections of voice, her breaths and hesitations when recalling the words from memory; rights repeated reiterates human rights. Prompted by Ross’s performance to align the question of the rights-bearing subject with that of bodily interdependency: rather than focusing upon human abuse and violation, Ross’s performance feels closely or rather literally related to the UDHR itself. What she makes apparent by performing the declaration is that performance art can activate the intertwining of two different aspects of human rights: the conceptual and the sensual. This mixture of research fields requires the chapter to navigate between ontological thinking, identity politics and performance studies. Ultimately, what compels me to research the nodal point of these intersecting perspectives is the question of solidarity: How might attuning to listening help us to generate and maintain solidarity with bodies that speak out against injustice and inequality?

Introduction  17

The fourth chapter analyses human rights and the act of listening in relation to the work of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, the 2019 Turner-Prize winner, whose artistic practice champions a “forensic aesthetics” (Weizman and Keenan 2012). In addition to my theoretical analysis, I also include an interview with the artist held in 2020. This chapter analyses Hamdan’s performative interventions, which engage with listening, testimony and stories shared by refugees and asylum seekers regarding their legal asylum procedure. I will discuss how Hamdan investigates human rights violations by drawing upon artistic practices and new emerging technologies. Drawing on the discussions of listening from the previous chapter, I place Hamdan’s work on the politics of listening in dialogue with discussions about the limits and ethics of performative representation – particularly with regard to refugees and asylum seekers. In doing this, I consider the ethico-political quandary between staying silent and speaking up in the face of injustice and institutional violence. While Monica Ross’s recital compels audiences to listen collectively and attune to legal matter by a means other than expert cognition, Hamdan’s intervention signals a profound shift in the political agency artists might be granted when intervening in the realm of legal matter and asylum law. Due to his artistic expertise in listening, Hamdan was called to serve as an expert witness at a tribunal, dealing not with art-related issues but with an urgent matter of human rights. Ultimately, the chapter asks: How can we practice a listening based on human rights, which calls into question the distribution of narrative resources and the limitations by which voices can be heard and recognised in institutional politics? In the fifth chapter, I turn towards questions of human rights and institutional imagination. It is not only place and mobility but also time, temporality and the idea of the “event” that make the experience of forced displacement uncertain and unknowable (Ramsay 2018, 17). Thus, any sense of coherence and continuity tends to be disrupted or effaced while in the midst of the asylum system. Therefore, this chapter moves from the idea of the temporal aesthetic event as a crucial mode of performance to outline how contemporary artists have shifted their focus on imagining new, different and radically inclusive institutions. The chapter begins with a review of the performance RECHT (2015), which asks how a more just global legal system could be designed, other than by instituted experts and established rights discourse. Following that, I map institutional critique by drawing on Andrea Fraser’s Museum Highlights (1989) and explain how it can be used as an analytical tool for this kind of institutional imagination. Guiding questions for the chapter are therefore: Can we understand the turn towards institutions in the arts as a meaningful, long-term response to forced displacement and the perilous state of limbo that many refugees must endure? Despite the United Nation’s importance in the protection of human rights, its make-up and approach have been continually challenged from both feminist and post-colonial perspectives, because representation and political agency here are limited to the idea of citizenship and the sovereign national. Tackling the narrative of

18 Introduction

institutional violence rigorously but f lexibly, the artworks analysed in this chapter reveal the shortcomings of legislative and executive institutional bodies. Ultimately, the chapter questions how temporary performance events can generate what Mother Courage in Bertolt Brecht’s play has called a “long anger”, which nurtures long-term solidarity, togetherness and dependency. In doing so, I will argue that performance artists like Akira Takayama who deal with human rights issues crucially reimagine both human rights and art-making itself, which can lead to building radically new and different kinds of institutions. The sixth chapter focuses on Jonas Staal’s artistic intervention with the New World Summit, which tackles political institutional transformation, politicises aesthetics and engages the perilousness and violence of statelessness. This chapter will analyse how Staal’s work New World Summit facilitates a migratory, mobile platform for stateless peoples to represent themselves politically. The New World Summit presents a durable means of assembly in different locations across the world, a means for political movements like the Kurdish Women’s Movement, which are not recognised by the UN to participate in political life. Finally, I discuss the transformative political potential of the New World Summit and juxtapose its assemblies’ temporal, f leeting form of performative engagement and its permanent institutional character. The New World Summit removes statelessness from notions of racialised victimhood, liberalist discourses of hospitality and white saviourism, and instead demonstrates how the arts are a necessary driver for transnational solidarity and new political alliances.

References Agamben, Giorgio, “Beyond Human Rights”, Social Engineering 15 (2008): 90–95. Ahmed, Sara, “Deconstruction and Law’s Other: Towards a Feminist Theory of Embodied Legal Rights”, Social  &  Legal Studies 4.1 (1995): 55–73. https://doi. org/10.1177/096466399500400103 Ahmed, Sara, “The Nonperformativity of Antiracism”, Meridians 7.1 (2006): 104– 126. www.jstor.org/stable/40338719 Ahmed, Sara, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Durham, NC: Duke University Press (2012). Amnesty International, “The Right to Conscientious Objection to Military Service”, (30 Aug 2014), https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/8000/ pol310012014en.pdf (accessed 4 Jan 2019). Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcout Brace Jovanovich (1986). Austin, John Langshaw, How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1976). Azoulay, Ariella, “What Are Human Rights?”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35.1 (2015): 8–20. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-2876056 Balibar, Étienne, “Is a Philosophy of Human Civic Rights Possible?”, South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2–3 (2004): 311–322. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-311

Introduction  19 Becker, Florian, Paola Hernández, and Brenda Werth (eds.), Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First-Century Theater: Global Perspectives, New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2013). Benhabib, Seyla, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2004). Boal, Augusto, Legislative Theatre, London: Routledge (1998). Boal, Augusto, Theatre of the Oppressed, London: Pluto Press (2008). Bobbio, Noberto, The Age of Rights, Cambridge: Polity Press (1996). Cañas, Tania, “10 Things You Need to Consider if You Are an Artist – Not of the Refugee and Asylum Seeker Community – Looking to Work With Our Community”, Rise. Refugees, Survivors and Ex-Detainees (5 Oct 2015), http://riserefugee. org/10-things-you-need-to-consider-if-you-are-an-artist-not-of-the-refugee­ and-asylum-seeker-communit y-looking-to-work-with-our-communit y/ (accessed 21 Nov 2016). Cole, Catherine M., Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (2010). Cox, Emma, “Processional Aesthetics and Irregular Transit: Envisioning Refugees in Europe”, Theatre Journal 69.4 (2017): 477–498. https://doi.org/10.1353/ tj.2017.0066 Cox, Emma, and Caroline Wake, “Envisioning Asylum/Engendering Crisis: Or, Performance and Forced Migration 10 Years On”, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 23.2 (2018): 137–147. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 13569783.2018.1442714 Cox, Emma, and Marilena Zaroulia, “Mare Nostrum, or on Water Matters”, Performance Research 21.2 (2016): 141–149. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2016.11 75724 Derbyshire, Harry, and Loveday Hodson, “Performing Injustice: Human Rights and Verbatim Theatre”, Law and Humanities 2.2 (2008): 191–211. https://doi.org/10.10 80/17521483.2008.11423751 Douzinas, Costas, Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, London: Routledge (2007). Dreher, Tanja, Michael Flood, and Brian Martin, “Combining Academia and Activism: Common Obstacles and Useful Tools”, Australian Universities Review 55.1 (2013): 17–26. http://ro.uow.edu.au/lhapapers/89 Freeman, Michael, “Putting Law in its Place: An Interdisciplinary Evaluation of National Amnesty Laws”, in: Saladin Meckled-García and Başak Cali (eds.), The Legalization of Human Rights, Abingdon/New York: Routledge (2006), 49–64. Gündoğdu, Ayten, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants, Cary, NC: Oxford University Press (2015). Hussein, Zeid Ra’ad Al, “Darker and More Dangerous: High Commissioner Updates the Human Rights Council on Human Rights Issues in 40 Countries” (2017), http:// www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22041& LangID=E (accessed 27 Aug 2018). Ignatieff, Michael, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (2001). Kapur, Ratna, Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism, London: GlassHouse (2005). MacKinnon, Catherine, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press (2006).

20 Introduction Madison, Soyini D., Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press (2010). McNeilly, Kathryn, “Are Rights Out of Time? International Human Rights Law, Temporality, and Radical Social Change”, Social & Legal Studies XX.X (2018): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/0964663918815729 Mihr, Anja, and Mark Gibney, “Introduction”, in: Anja Mihr and Mark Gibney (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Human Rights, Vols.1-2, Sage (2014), xxxi–xxxix. Mooney, Annabelle, “‘Corporeal Mentality’: The Book of Blood, Universal Human Rights, and the Body”, Journal of Human Rights 13.4 (2014a): 480–497. https://doi. org/10.1080/14754835.2014.886954 Mooney, Annabelle, Human Rights and the Body: Hidden in Plain Sight, Farnham: Routledge (2014b). Morin, Emilie, and Mary Luckhurst (eds.), Theatre and Human Rights after 1945: Things Unspeakable, Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2015). Phipps, Alison, “Research for CULT Committee: Why Cultural Work with Refugees”, European Parliament, Policy Department for Structural Cohesion Policies (2017), https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/IDAN/2017/602004/IPOL_ IDA(2017)602004_EN.pdf (accessed 26 April 2021). Rae, Paul, Theatre and Human Rights, Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2009). Ramsay, Georgina, Impossible Refuge: The Control and Constraint of Refugee Futures, Milton: Routledge (2018). Rancière, Jacques, “Who Is the Subject on the Rights of Man?”, South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2 (2004): 297–310. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-297 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, and César A. Rodríguez-Garavito (eds.), Law and Globalisation from Below: Toward a Cosmopolitan Legality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2005). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Use and Abuse of Human Rights”, boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture 32.1 (2005): 131–189. https://doi. org/10.1215/01903659-32-1-131 Thompson, James, Applied Theatre: Bewilderment and Beyond, Oxford: Peter Lang (2012). Thompson, James, Humanitarian Performance: From Disaster Tragedies to Spectacles of War, London: Seagull Books (2014). United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, http://www.un.org/en/ universal-declaration-human-rights/ (accessed 5 Dec 2018). UNHCR, “Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees”, http:// www.unhcr.org/uk/3b66c2aa10 (accessed 3 Aug 2018). UNHCR, “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2019” (2019), https://www. unhcr.org/5ee200e37.pdf (accessed 18 Nov 2020). Weizman, Eyal, and Thomas Keenan, Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics, Berlin: Sternberg Press (2012). Wilmer, Steve, Performing Statelessness in Europe, London: Palgrave Macmillan (2018). Withers, Rachel, “By Dint of Repetition: On the Lasting Legacy of Monica Ross”, Art & Christian Enquiry 77 (2014): 2–5. Wynter, Sylvia, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation. An Argument”, New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003): 257–337. Žižek, Slavoj, “Against Human Rights”, New Left Review 34 (2005): 115–131.

1

Human rights and European bordering

What is to be done then? What is to be done then? This is a crucial question for this chapter, and it functions as a leitmotif throughout the book. The question is constantly posed regarding the so-called refugee crisis in Europe, which heightened in the summer of 2015. The question “what is to be done then?” has informed the political works of various theatre makers and performance artists and is prevalent in discussions on migration within the academy and in everyday life. This question demands a blueprint for action in a time of political crisis; it highlights the moment when there is nothing left to do but protest on the streets. Posed by artists, audiences, politicians, citizens and stateless people alike, the question expresses a willingness to act; in the face of an overwhelming challenge, it expresses anything but resignation. Nonetheless, the way the question is formed – “what is to be done then?” as opposed to “what can I do then?” – highlights a mode of ref lection and hesitation, or even desperation: the asker seems to shy away from responsibility and poses the question in a passive way. There is a need for some kind of action, but the question of who should perform it is left unanswered. The grammatical participle, on the one hand, expresses that the asker is aware of the problem at stake and actively wants to engage with it. On the other hand, the question expresses that one does not know what to do and where to seek guidance for how to act. It awaits a reply and marks a dialogic openness, a symbolic threshold to an actual doing and intervening. “What is to be done then?” is a rather old question, and the title of Lenin’s famous 1901 revolutionary pamphlet Chto delat? As Silvija Jestrović and Ameet Parameswaran pinpoint, the question “is immediately associated with the leftist revolutionary history, legacy, and excavation into the cultures of the Left” ( Jestrović and Parameswaran 2019, 221). Crucially, the question is anything but rhetorical. With a Brechtian dramaturgical lens, they consequently argue that we ought not so much be concerned with what is the doing, but how the doing is performed (“Kak delat?”). I also add an ethical component to this: How to perform the doing well?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003110293-2

22  Human rights and European bordering

Addressing the question “what is to be done then?” with regard to theatre and migration necessitates a reassessment of how we understand the political efficacy of theatre which deals with refugees, and particularly theatre which intervenes in the systematic failure to deal with contemporary migration movements (Marschall 2018). The motivation to reassess the very question of “what is to be done then?” evolves from the politicised urgency of the so-called refugee crisis – a crisis that could be more properly defined as a humanitarian crisis, in which many refugees, migrants and racialised groups face unjust asylum laws and pernicious nationalist politics. My motivation in writing about this topic is the need to raise awareness of the crisis’s systematic nature. This reaches beyond the pervasively mediatised moment of perilous border crossings, of refugees’ arrival on a nation-state’s territory. In their discussion of contemporary performance works that address the politics of arrival and the dangerous crossings of the Mediterranean in particular, Emma Cox and Marilena Zaroulia ask: “what happens after the arrival, after we have reacted to images of migrants’ arrival or demise?” (Cox and Zaroulia 2016, 148). More and more, artists emphasise and explore the possible longevity and sustenance of such artist-driven political action, rather than temporary political tactics, when asking “what is to be done then?” (Malzacher 2014; 2016).

How to respond well to European borders? Many meaningful socially engaged artworks and theatre projects with and about refugees have aimed to bring about individual empowerment, fought for the rights of the marginalised and created a sense of belonging within new cultural environments. It is important to attend to the complexity of what makes a socially engaged artwork meaningful and who has the agency to decide its societal, economic, or aesthetic merit. My intention here is to bring about a productive friction around issues of power, instrumentalisation and the efficacy of socially engaged artworks with and about refugees. I refer here to the exemplary refugee-led advocacy statement of ethical principles for cultural work by RISE: Refugee Survivors and eX-detainees which I have discussed in the introduction. What becomes problematic in the ubiquity of the represented, aestheticised refugee body is the prevalent disjuncture of we and them, of here and there. To utter and hail a “we” in a nuanced and precise way, rather than ill-defined way, is key to refrain from assuming a shared liberal, left-leaning viewpoint and to refrain from limiting possibilities of political coalition, conf lict and solidarity across differences. I therefore second Astrida Neimanis when she states: I intentionally interpellate both author and reader into a position of relative privilege in relation to any number of possible others that they might seek to represent; I assume that no one reading this article will be

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exempt from having to grapple with the ethics of representing others. I also acknowledge that author and reader may differ considerably in the extent to which they inhabit the site of the represented other. “We” is always the most difficult but necessary question. (Neimanis 2015, 151) The addressing of an ill-defined “we” also troubles socially engaged arts practices and Christa Noel Robbins critiques a “tendency of many artists to elide their own roles in setting up [neoliberal relations] for ostensibly free exchange and convivial interactions” (Robbins 2015, 174). Optimistically celebrating participation as that which enables exchange, interaction, and agency is a recurring trope in theatre and performance scholarship and in my own habits of thinking. However, this optimism risks to foreclose a more critical engagement with coercive and violent structures in socially engaged arts and the “ways in which individuals are variously folded into or blocked out of community-forming activities” (Robbins 2015, 172). Various theatre makers have responded to the so-called refugee crisis across Europe since 2015 with artworks, plays and performances through socially engaged practices (Marschall 2016, 2018). While many have engaged with specific local communities, journeys over the Mediterranean Sea, stories of border crossings, the arrival of refugees, and the bureaucratic asylum apparatus, fewer have dealt with systemic, racial and institutional violence. What annexes much of the political stakes of contemporary refugee artworks, I would suggest, is the occluding of the very realm of political decision-making that engenders the moment of crisis in the first place. The political stakes are high in regard to Europe’s organisation of its response resources, the policing of refugees’ mobility and the classifying of statelessness, which at worst costs so many people their lives. More often than not, contemporary images and narratives about refugees not only perpetuate discourses of white hegemonic, non-refugee European audiences but almost inevitably serve as an “emotional commodity” (Cox 2012, 128), reinforcing social and political hierarchies that objectify refugees’ lives without calling their audiences to social action. While it is my undertaking here to foreground questions of belonging, identity and difference within the wider discourse of political performances and interventions into contemporary European borders, as continuity of imperial violence and colonialism. I invert the typical focus on participation found within socially engaged art in my insistence that the responsibility for action lies, in the first instance, with powerful, privileged and institutional players. By looking at how these artistic interventions address larger political institutions in need of structural reform, abolition or decolonisation, I identify a cultural longing for political commitment, efficacy and longevity in performances. Indeed, our social encounters, how we listen to each other, how we share stories and make space for one another – literally, but also metaphorically, in language – are just as important to structural reform.

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They are here because you were there Clearly, when we engage with migration, asylum and refugee-ness in the 2010s, as I am doing in this book, we are “crossing the colonial present” and operating in globally networked cultures and systems of thinking and being in the world (Pratt and Johnston 2019). Some European borders as we geographically know and literally map them today are only a couple of years old, for example, if we think of the history of Yugoslavia (Gluhovic 2013; Jestrović 2013). They are even shifting everyday anew, if we were to look at them through a geological lens and consider the dynamics of shores, tides, land mass and sea. Keeping this in mind, what many have conceived as an extraordinary, new mass migration movement or even a so-called European refugee crisis since 2015 forfeits that our contemporary is imbued with colonial residues of mapping the world, managing “us” and “them”, psycho-social wounds, oppression and racialised othering. Refugee struggles and refugee agencies in Europe long predate 2015 but have been annexed by the politicisation of the “crisis” ( Jeffers 2012; Marschall 2018; Stierl 2019). Ida Danewid put it more eloquently, stating that we face a “general problem that extends beyond the choppy waters of the Mediterranean” and we need to rethink solidarity and ethics based on “shared, intertwined histories that arise out of the colonial past and the neocolonial present” (Danewid 2017, 1683). In Stuart Hall’s words: “They are here because you were there. There is an umbilical connection. There is no understanding Englishness [and I add Europeanness] without understanding its imperial and colonial dimensions” (Hall in Danewid 2017, 1683). The perilous consequences of refugees crossing European borders, new pan-national movements and emerging art practices present an urgent need to ref lect upon unfolding shifts in our understanding of politics and human rights. Addressing this need in the field of theatre, and more specifically in relation to contemporary artistic interventions, necessarily includes a discussion of complex political issues which go beyond the purely scholarly debates around where we draw the lines between art, activism and politics. Contemporary and future politics within and beyond Europe will essentially have to deal with refugees, asylum and statelessness on a long-term basis. Some interventions appear to provide definite answers to the question of “what is to be done then?”; answers that stress the pivotal role of the state as the centrally responsible political actor. If interventions focus on an abstract, universalist humanity of refugees, rather than on a historic one, they transform “the responsible colonial agent into an innocent bystander, confirming its status as ‘ethical’, ‘good’, and ‘humane’” (Danewid 2017, 1684). Indeed, there is an issue with European subjects re-constituting themselves as “ethical”, “good” and “innocent of its imperialist histories and present complicities” (Danewid 2017, 1684). In particular, socially engaged arts which focus on the role of refugees and vulnerability can risk to elude institutional politics and responsibility in favour of

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a new cosmopolitan ethics. Such works might counteract the rise of populist, far-right, xenophobic and racist political movements and parties. However, the pitfalls include a mere symbolic gesturing towards and call for empathy and solidarity with migrants lost at sea. Acknowledging the important postcolonial and feminist question of “who counts as human” and who does not in regard to contemporary wars, forms of militarisation and other dehumanising struggles, there is danger, when we focus on the ontological, rather than historical, in the turn to ethics and in the search for what binds us all together, for a universal humanity (Danewid 2017). A new, critical humanism based on the notion of shared bodily vulnerability should make it possible to recognise migrants’ lives as part of the European or Western political community. However, these responses are indicative of a general problematic, endemic to both left-wing activism and academic debate, which reproduces rather than challenges the foundational assumption of the far right. By focusing on abstract – as opposed to historical – humanity, these discourses contribute to an ideological formation that disconnects connected histories and turns questions of responsibility, guilt, restitution, repentance, and structural reform into matters of empathy, generosity, and hospitality. The result is a colonial and patronising fantasy of the white man’s burden – based on the desire to protect and offer political resistance for endangered others – which ultimately does little to challenge established interpretations that see Europe as the bastion of democracy, liberty, and universal rights. (Danewid 2017, 1675) A historical awareness for the long-term presence of refugees in Europe in addition to the arrival of people f leeing conf lict, war, persecution and inhumane conditions demands a shift in social structures, new modes of imagination and a different kind of political decision-making. They call for a remodelling of our communities and a new understanding of belonging: How can we reimagine human rights and European borders? In the following, the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera takes centre stage, because her works reimagine human rights as a crossing of our colonial present and the Atlantic, while also enacting rights claims, which are transnationally entangled with the violence of European bordering.

Immigrant Movement International Bruguera initiated the Immigrant Movement International project in the USA to instigate collective claims for immigrants’ human rights. Immigrant Movement International connects artistic practice, activist organising and critical legal work. In her manifesto, Bruguera calls for “immigrant respect”, “immigrant rights” and “international citizenry” (Bruguera 2011).

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Immigrant Movement International aims for “community building under the masthead of ‘everyone is an immigrant’” (Feiss 2013), and its logo shows the globe and the earth’s continents from four different perspectives. For Caterina Scarabicchi, this “image seems to aptly summarise an activist struggle that seeks to expand the notion of community well beyond national identities” (Scarabicchi 2020, 144). By engaging with politicised migrant identity and marginalisation through reimagining rights beyond an ethics or aesthetics binary, Bruguera’s work reinvigorates the chapter’s initial question “what is to be done then?” to show possible international alliances between migrant communities and the necessity to rework asylum and migration law. Immigrant Movement International was first initiated as a partnership between Bruguera and the Queens Museum in the New York metropolitan area. It received funding by Creative Time, the City and State Council and other foundations. Undocumented migrants worked together with international artists invited to New York, and eventually, the artwork took on the form of a community centre located in the Corona neighbourhood of Queens, where “approximately 138 languages are spoken” (Bruguera 2011). The community centre pays “respect to the tradition and victories of US civic movements” (Bruguera 2011), and it is still active and running today. Immigrant Movement International invited immigrant residents to use free healthcare and free educational programmes including workshops on cooking and urban gardening, language and art history, music and dance, bicycle maintenance and construction safety, and computer literacy and screen printing. By 2014, around 250 immigrant families were participating regularly in these programmes (World Cities Culture Forum 2014). In addition, Immigrant Movement International has facilitated occasional performative interventions advocating for immigration reform. They “look very much like, in fact are often indiscernible form, political demonstrations” (Neufeld 2015, 122), including letter-writing campaigns, and slogan and manifesto-writing workshops. Crucially, Immigrant Movement International is a long-term project. Bruguera characterises “long-term projects [as] educational processes and as knowledge evolves so does the project. These projects are about creating an ecology that embodies the desired change, where people can experiment with what they want before it is socially established, that is, before it becomes culture” (Bruguera in Kershaw 2015, 18). With artistic and activist training, organising on local sites and creating a community space with a growing membership, Immigrant Movement International has jumped in scale and now operates on a transnational level. In 2015, five years after its launch, Bruguera posited the project’s “maturity” and ref lected on the transnational research and alliances the project has made with other immigrant groups in the UK, the Netherlands, Mexico, Sweden and Israel (Kershaw 2015, 15). Bruguera expresses one of her goals in relation to the Queens Museum to be “that institutions understand the need to have a long-term relationship with projects like this one” (Bruguera in Kershaw 2015, 15).

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Tom Finkelpearl, former director of the Queens Museum, recalls that the question frequently raised about Immigrant Movement International was “where is the art in that?” (Neufeld 2015, 123). It is telling that audiences address Finkelpearl as authoritive voice in arts discourse, rather than the project participants. In doing so, audiences and the general public around Immigrant Movement International perform his and the museum’s institutional authority of the artworld. However, Bruguera retains, takes advantage of and values the “institutionally maintained boundaries of the artworld […] even as the particular shape of the institutionalization is criticized” (Neufeld 2015, 123). Bruguera situates Immigrant Movement International and other projects within the paradox between her artworld network and persona, and yet destabilises its normative foundations from within, creating new spaces and institutional recognition for Othered communities. Over time, the space brought together a community of immigrants who politically organised themselves and ran campaigns for social and political self-representation at the local, national and global levels. Members of Immigrant Movement International were predominantly Latinx American, mainly from Mexico and Ecuador, as well as from the Caribbean and China (Kershaw 2015, 12). Since Bruguera left the official project as leader in 2015, the members have continued the project and have transformed it into an independently run community centre and organisation.

Rights as that which we cannot not want Immigrant Movement International enacts rights claims, which imagine and desire rights as that which “we cannot not want” (Spivak 1999, 110). Through its performative interventions and public rights claims, the project exposes and draws media, legal and political attention to marginalised community-based methods of survival. For example, Bruguera has publicly shared an anecdote about the informal economic activity outside of legal frameworks in Corona, Queens, where the Immigrant Movement International Centre is located. Bruguera tells of how she got into an “illegal” cab in the neighbourhood and was charged only $4, whereas an “outsider” would typically be charged $20. For Bruguera, this “is how she knows the project is ‘working’” (Bruguera in Feiss 2013). Sharing such testimonies, appealing to local political representatives and recruiting immigrant lawyers is a pivotal means for mobilising against perilous structural disadvantages such as the legal risks and lack of social security and healthcare. These actions do mean that Immigrant Movement International is working, but at the same time they risk dismantling this very informal economy, which “bind[s] communities together outside of legally recognized categories” (Feiss 2013). The risk lies in making rights the only possible empirical language for their community engagement and expressing their interests and demands. Consequently, the language of rights invokes their legal and political enforcement, for example, the employment law that has long failed to mandate liveable minimum wages.

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Immigrant Movement International pinpoints what is at stake in the paradox to claim rights as a marginalised subject: claiming one’s human rights can be both emancipating and essentialising, that is, locking one into a fixed marginalised identity and into Western liberal rights discourse, as well as its regulatory and symbolic frameworks. In Tavia Nyong’o’s words, albeit uttered in a context of queer Black performance, “the desire to move beyond difference in the very process of recognizing it is a powerful one. But so too is the impulse to reject as old-fashioned minoritarian forms of life and struggle that succeeded in reproducing themselves at the ostensible price of also reproducing the dominant social order” (Nyong’o 2019, 21–22). Even if conceived as an artistic project rather than a civil rights movement, Immigrant Movement International engages this conundrum of rights: On the one hand, rights claims made on the basis of the rule of law entrap marginalised people in hegemonic modes of power and regulatory frameworks. On the other hand, rights claims made by historic civil rights movements have achieved material impact, that is, the right to vote, abortion and gay marriage. Put differently: How to reconcile the freedoms afforded by rights, the making lives better, with the ways in which they reinscribe the subjugation, and provide new ground for the proliferation of power, that they were meant to appeal in the first place? (Feiss 2013) Ellen Feiss draws on Wendy Brown’s rights critique to analyse Immigrant Movement International through a critical legal studies methodology (Feiss 2013). In her critique of the women’s rights movement, Brown asks whether a leftist project is limited by forgetting about potential spaces of recognition and equality beyond an illusion of rights-based progress if the social order is otherwise kept intact and unchanged (Brown 2002, 432). Critical race scholars counter this by emphasising the non-negotiability of rights for historically marginalised peoples (Kennedy 2002, 184). Yet, to claim rights sets in motion the exercising of a right by “regulative forces” (Feiss 2013) not limited to the law, including social agencies, employers, or mass media, which continue to reproduce entrenched normative categories of identity. Thus, according to a critical legal studies perspective, “Bruguera’s project actually opens up avenues for regulation and control that didn’t exist before” (Feiss 2013). To paraphrase Brown, to have one’s rights recognised as immigrant is not to be free of being designated and subordinated by borders, nationality, statelessness, citizenship, or the asylum system (Brown 2002, 432). Clearly, the material realities and bodily consequences of having your rights legally recognised are often a question of life and death. Without putting this point against appeals only for direct action, as I argue throughout this book, it is cultural and artistic spaces which can “envision rights discourse under a wholly different set of constraints” (Feiss 2013) and across intersectional difference. However, Immigrant Movement International as a cultural

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space poses severe issues because it reinforces “identity categories which are entrenched within a larger field of power operations” (Feiss 2013), namely, categories such as legal and illegal immigrants, or first- and second-class or non-citizens. Immigrant Movement International encourages building a creative space within one homogenised immigrant identity category, a “massively oversimplified subject position” (Feiss 2013), which is at odds with its policing through intersecting raced, gendered and classed structures. This ill-defined “we” diminishes difference across migrant subjectivities and ignores the historically unequal access to and use of rights.

Arte Útil Bruguera stands as a key reference point to contextualise contemporary works in the field of theatre, migration and marginalised identities through the discourse around socially engaged art. The notion of art’s usefulness for social progress and emancipation emerged in Anglo-centric scholarship in the 1990s (Bishop 2011, 217). Nato Thompson’s prominent question for anyone concerned with socially engaged art reads no longer “is this art?” but rather “is it useful?” (Thompson 2012, 16). A consequent question follows: “What does ‘good’ mean for art that seeks justice?” (Feiss 2013). Claire Bishop argues that socially engaged art, with its privileging of process over product, can make you “feel good” but it does not necessarily have to “do good” (Bishop 2004, 79). Following this line of thought, James Thompson (2009) proposes that the means and value of socially engaged artwork are to be found in a narrative of affect, rather than concrete effect, because an affect-oriented perspective allows for a less defined, less constricted encounter of the public with the performing arts. Socially engaged performance tends to reach out into everyday life and reference the labour of the performing act; it endeavours to demarcate the event (or product) of public performance from its creative process ( Jackson 2011, 26). Through this account, the artwork’s political potential lies in its possibilities to transform individuals through affective encounters and through enactive storytelling. Alternatively, emphasising the contiguity of affect and effect, recent theatre work aiming to engender social change suggests it is productive to interrogate the temporal deferral of political efficacy by socially engaged performance, in particular contemporary pieces which respond to refugees’ perilous border crossings (O’Gorman and Werry 2012, 3). For Bruguera, socially engaged art is all about an artist’s commitment to a community. Long-term projects “can construct new ethical paradigms” (Bruguera 2020, 18), as opposed to short-term projects, which can generate awareness through deconstructing and dismantling behaviours. When asked about the longevity of Immigrant Movement International, Bruguera replies It is not about the length of time or about durability or about preservation of the project. Rather it is about the time that it takes to build and change something in a community. In my experience this only achieved

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if the community not only feels represented in the project, but if they feel the project responds to their needs and if the project is useful to them. (Bruguera in Kershaw 2015, 22) An intricate part of making and engaging with socially engaged art practices is changing the participant’s skill sets, the rules of encounter and thus the level of direct political environment. Seen in this way, socially engaged arts essentially and paradigmatically means to co-create. It could be understood as an on-the-ground artistic strategy for political resistance, a tool for pedagogy, therapy, empowerment, or protest. As I will unpack in the following paragraphs, there are some risks and pitfalls involved when valuing the usefulness of socially engaged arts, as Bruguera expresses above. However, such value judgements and equally their critique are based on modernist, colonial notions of artistic autonomy and authorship, and therefore they perhaps reveal more about prefigurative societal norms and representational registers than the artwork itself. Within the current context of draconian border policies and growing xenophobia towards migrants, “such art’s value” relies on their “capacity to offer a space of critical distance from heteronomous forces (governments, the EU) and generate an aesthetic experience distinct from, yet in critical dialogue with, border violence” (Tello 2019, 152). A paradigm of usefulness has taken centre stage in Bruguera’s works since she started calling for Arte Útil, a strategy within the broader field of socially engaged arts to intervene in local and international politics. In 2001, Bruguera established the Asociación de Arte Útil, which emphasises recent discourse on socially engaged art, the affirmation of usefulness and the labour of social reproduction taking place within the realm of arts. Arte Útil includes artworks which strive towards more measurable outcomes as well as more speculative aims, such as “hav[ing] practical, beneficial outcomes for its users”, or “re-establish[ing] aesthetics as a system of transformation” (Bruguera n.d.). The stakes for Bruguera, her collaborators and live participants in Arte Útil, are high: “failure is not a possibility. If the project fails, it is not Arte Útil” (Bruguera in Gogarty 2017, 124–125). Arte Útil is “political-timing specific” (Bruguera in Kershaw 2015, 24), which means that there has to be an awareness of how contemporary political conditions make the artistic work necessary and that aesthetic decisions are consequences of and consequential for political decisions at both the individual artistic and societal levels. Useful to whom, and useful how? Arte Útil strategies are limited to measurable values of usefulness, which are intimately and painfully ingrained in today’s global labour economy and in the racialisation of social reproduction. Bruguera’s empirical rights language, and thus its “utilitarian assertion”, lies “under a Left legal critique, which accepts no universal claims of use-value, even automatically distrusts such affirmations as counterproductive” (Feiss 2013). Universalist perspectives such as those of Immigrant Movement International are problematic insofar as they assume an “equal use of rights” (Feiss 2013) and do not take into account material and symbolic power hierarchies

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and histories of violence – or the intersecting racialised, gendered, classed privileges and multiple social powers that make each immigrant unique in her own political position. One of Feiss’s crucial critiques, and I agree, is that “Immigrant Movement International in part doesn’t mention race because it attempts to address the gap between privileged and proletariat immigration through solidarity, but that separation is predicated on specific regions of the world and their accompanying racial signifiers” (Feiss 2013, emphasis in original). The structural problem at hand, and perhaps an artist’s responsibility, or calling, and equally mine as structurally advantaged researcher, is to both: working towards obtaining rights and expressing that they are materially necessary and yet expressing that they are likewise inadequate. I would argue that there is something sticky in both Arte Útil and Immigrant Movement International: the discipline of theatre and performance studies in the Global North has a persistently optimistic attachment to participation – to somehow always productive “neoliberal forms of address” (Robbins 2015, 177). I too, from my privileged position of white, cis-female European theatre and performance scholar with little material and symbolic risk, tend to think, analyse and write about contemporary political performances with a kind of “cruel optimism”, to continue looking and longing for any performance’s “political solidarity and social efficacy” (Robbins 2015, 177). My writing and thinking about Bruguera’s work methodologically risks to be stuck to this about-ness, while feeling deeply indebted to and called to action by the work – and yet, working from a physical, intellectual and structural distance. Her perilous work and the work of the Immigrant Movement International takes place amidst authoritarian, dictatorial regimes, oppression, violent political conf lict and social death. Thus, witnessing Bruguera’s work calls me to unlearn habits of my disciplinary thinking, and I will therefore turn towards her rejection of the term “performance art”, her rejection of imperial habits and histories of performance scholarship in a post-colonial present.

Rejecting “performance art” Coming originally from Cuba and having studied a Master of Fine Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999, Bruguera built her career on commissions and professional recognition by museums such as the Guggenheim, MoMA and Tate Modern. Bruguera (perhaps now unwillingly) occupies a split position as kind of insider/outsider of the English speaking, predominantly white, Global North, upper-middle-class artworld, and practising a wayward form of socially engaged arts which cannot easily be collected by art museums. It is telling that in contrast to Coco Fusco’s (2015) critique, Bruguera outspokenly opposes the institutionalised Western artworld, its audiences, epistemologies and language, and in doing so she attests to this anachronistic taxonomy of an “inside/outside Cuba binary” (Munoz 2000, 256). Important to me as white European performance scholar is how she has rejected the term

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“performance art” and instead conceptualises her work as Arte de Conducta, and later as Arte Útil (Bruguera and Nardo 2007, 81). Both Spanish terms present a form of linguistic resistance as Bruguera seeks to anchor her art in political action driven by socio-economic urgencies in Cuba, Latin America and former Socialist countries (Curía 2009), rather than English-speaking cultural histories around the performative turn of the 1970s. At a public lecture in Havana in 2003, Bruguera ref lected on her perceived mispronunciation of the word “performance” when studying in the USA, which prompted her to rethink “whether [she] wanted to do something which [she] did not entirely master, precisely because, culturally, it did not belong to [her]” (Rosero 2017, 89). This story is telling of Bruguera’s marginalisation and her empowering move to reclaim her heritage, language and positionality, that is, the terrain of seemingly “second hand knowledge” (Vujanović 2013, 123). At the same time, it is also telling of how, for Bruguera, a narrative of mastery persists in the unquestioned terrain of performative art-making. Later, in 2007, she explained further in an interview with the curator Rebecca Di Nardo: My work has come out of my discomfort. First with the visual arts and their inevitable distance from life and later, with performance art, beginning with its name: “performance”, a word in English that is linked to a cultural tradition that has nothing to do with my own. Many things have made me feel uncomfortable over time with performance art: the expectations people have with it, its transformation into visual iconography and its apparent fatalism to become entertainment. (Bruguera and Nardo 2007, 79) Pronouncing the English word “performance” with her Caribbean-Spanish accident, audibly marked Bruguera in the US-American context as alien and non-native in relation to the dominant accent and spoken language, but also as alien and non-native in relation to US citizenship (at least to some hegemonic ears). The alienation from “performance” also extends to how the artistic practice of Arte Útil troubles the colonising and racialising dimensions which underpin performance studies and the universalising claims made about performance art. Here, I mean specifically the historic narrative of performance art and performance studies’ emergence in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. This narrative testifies to the problems of performance’s inherited colonially and empirically white dominated epistemologies, discourses and methods from disciplines such as anthropology and philosophy, literature and art history. I was taught this historical narrative, these epistemologies, discourses and methods too during my undergraduate degree, and I am committed to unlearning and “unteaching” them. Bruguera expresses a long-standing and deep suspicion of this colonial historiography, of performance art’s institutionalisation and transformation into a museal category, which can be commodified, collected and displayed in

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any context. She also expresses a long-standing and deep suspicion of performance art’s symbolic value. Her critique is that context-specific performative interventions have become canonised and commodified by art and academic institutions in the Global North to the extent that they are cast to be re-enacted in any given historical and geographic context, without respect to its political specificity. This makes Bruguera seek a clear geopolitical separation between institutionalised categories, colonial languages of performance art and her own, artistic practice and positionality in Cuba. Bruguera’s works do strategically use aesthetic iconography and symbolism, and to me, are deeply performative in that they have centred performance’s ephemerality and have prompted transformative social situations with audiences in a specific space and time and political context. Further, they have been written into the history of performance art by scholars and other artists alike, in particular El peso de la culpa (The burden of guilt) (1997), which has been written into the institution of theatre as a standard performance of Latin American Art (Birnbaum et al. 2011; Cullen 2008; Fusco 2000; Taylor and Constantino 2003; Smith 2011). Nonetheless, “calling her work performance would fail to signal that her practice is sited in a different genealogy, in a different tradition, related to the artistic and socioeconomic urgencies dictated by Latin American realities and, in particular, the Cuban context” (Rosero 2017, 89). Bruguera goes so far as to call this act of epistemic violence an “intellectual and art historical colonisation” (Bruguera and Vasquez 2012, 29). Language and terminology are tools of power and means to decolonise for Bruguera (2020a, 11), particularly in the Cuban context where “the visual language of violence is ubiquitous” (Barriuso 2017, 28). Notwithstanding Immigrant Movement International’s rights claims and engagement of law as a corpus of power, Arte Útil can also be understood as decolonial practice. Arte Útil contests modernity’s legacies by debunking postmodern aesthetics, exhibition logics and educational structures based on Global Northern, European models (Barriuso 2017, 7–8). It is the projects’ longevity, commitment to material results of social transformation and engagement of communities, which decentre the artist, notions of authorship and concerns about aesthetics. Taking seriously the legacy of bell hooks as well as Bruguera’s understanding of education as being a liberating force and as healing the colonial wound (Bruguera 2020b, 84), Immigrant Movement International calls for our transformation of Western habits of thinking and theorisation. Listening out for this implicit call, I am urged to bring theatre and performance back into the discursive playing field, drawing upon the notion that theatre allies itself with everything that Western modernity distrusts – the weak, the unfinished, the superf luous, the contingent. […] there is always something in the medium of theatre that refuses to serve a purpose and which is content, merely, to reproduce itself, again and again. (Lavery 2016, 234)

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It is certainly this kind of refusal that might lie at the heart of what, paradoxically, performance can and cannot mean and continues to ask us to enquire into our discipline’s intellectual imperial traditions, white dominated epistemologies and methods, not taking ourselves too seriously. As much as Bruguera is deeply suspicious of trained or professed white Western audiences from her positionality in Abya Yala, Sruti Bala calls upon the privileged theatre researcher and teacher to work towards “new habits of thinking the discipline and not just an addition of new things to think about” (Bala 2017, 335). This chapter and book contribute to exactly that: towards destabilising the white, Global North Western, citizen researcher position, and towards reimagining rights, the performing of law and social power structures across difference.

Living in Arendtian times In 2016, Bruguera founded the Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (the Hannah Arendt Institute for Artivism), which she describes as “an institute in Cuba and an online platform that hosts international artists and activists to foster civic literacy and policy change” (Bruguera in Helguera 2016). The crowdfunded institute combines performance art and protest, community participation and educational practice within the regime of censorship and oppression in Cuba. With the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism, Bruguera seeks to engage the “performativity of expectation and delivery” (Bruguera 2020b, 84) and to circumvent the law by recognising that it is a corpus of power and acting within its legal framework, but demonstrating what is not working or missing from it. The Hannah Arendt Institute for Artivism was inaugurated during the 12th Havana Biennial and on the anniversary of Cuba’s independence from the USA in 1902. As part of the inauguration, Bruguera performed a nearly 100-hour-long reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism from 1951 in Spanish. The drive for the public reading came out of Bruguera’s experience of being interrogated. The Cuban government had been interrogating her repeatedly for months after she had attempted the performative intervention Yo También Exijo in late 2014, a re-enactment of her 2009 performance Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Marschall 2021). Her intention was that Cuban citizens express their hopes for their country’s future through an open microphone placed on the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, one of the “most contested” sites in Havana both symbolically and historically (Rosero 2017, 86). Bruguera was arrested and detained by Cuban authorities and had her passport confiscated. During the exhaustive questioning about her work, Bruguera faced the same interrogator (Bruguera 2022). By intently listening and observing the procedure, she started becoming aware of how much the interrogator had to research and self-educate about the political issues Bruguera tackled in her works. The interrogator could ask her challenging questions only through

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making themselves familiar and engaging deeply with the political theories Bruguera bases her work on. In particular, when the interrogator questioned Bruguera about the attempted re-enactment of Tatlin’s Whisper #6, she recited almost word-by-word the Wikipedia article about the historical figure of Vladimir Tatlin. The interrogator emphasised the paradox that if Tatlin was a revolutionary figure, how could Bruguera’s intervention be anti-revolutionary when dedicated to Tatlin? Because of the interrogator’s insight and her dedicated preparation to learning about political theory and liberatory historical figures, Bruguera saw the potential for a new performative intervention into the Cuban government’s repressive regime. Bruguera therefore thought carefully about which theoretical work to base her subsequent performative intervention on, considering the subversive aim to make Cuban government officials read and deeply engage with this theoretical work and interrogate its revolutionary and anti-revolutionary perspectives, which could, in the best case, mobilise them politically. The result was the nearly 100-hour long and completed reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism in Bruguera’s own home. She had obtained a licence as a cuentapropista (private teacher) from the Cuban authorities so that she could legally open her private home and the reading to anyone who wanted to participate in it and in subsequent discussions indoors. Some of Bruguera’s friends, artists and curators who visited the biennale, and members of the opposition movement Damas de Blanco by female wives and relatives of jailed dissidents and those made to disappear, and only a few Cuban artists joined the reading (Mosquera 2015). A loudspeaker amplified the readers’ voices through wide-opened doors out to the streets. Gerardo Mosquera, a child of emigrated Cuban parents and eyewitness to the intervention, attests: [b]efore the opening, the police warned her that they would not allow her to perform in the street. Bruguera, in a clever move, managed to obtain a license as a private teacher, so it was perfectly legal for her to do the reading indoors. In a timely manner, loud construction noises from the street interfered with the reading’s soundscape, as workers began drilling in front of the house and in the neighbourhood. Luis Camnitzer, the Uruguayan artist, curator and educator, writes in his review that [t]he power of the piece wasn’t derived from the content of the text, but rather from the choice of book, the setting, and the concentrated endurance of those involved in the marathon. […] The reading was not louder than any music coming out of a window that one might normally hear on the street. And yet, a philosophical text, difficult to hear, and probably exceeding anyone’s conceivable attention span under the circumstances, was considered to be sufficiently threatening to the government (or at least some of

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its officials) that steps were taken to interfere with the performance. What they didn’t understand is that drilling made no difference. With or without the drilling noise, the piece was untouchable. Tania had identified a crack in the wall of official regulations and the authorities revealed themselves as one step short of the more equivalent of book burners. (Camnitzer 2015) This performative reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism thus intervenes into material and symbolic regimes at work in contemporary Cuba’s dictatorship. It tests the limits of “customary definitions, expectations, and authoritative rules” (Mosquera 2015) and crosses borders at the threshold of legality and illegality. The construction noises disrupted the reading and served as a disguised means for the Cuban government to intervene into the performative intervention itself. In turn, the performative reading subversively prompted the Cuban government’s investment in long-neglected road construction and infrastructure in the neighbourhood. With a loud bang, the book The Origins of Totalitarianism blew against a wall and landed onto the pavement. Bruguera had thrown the book away, shortly before police arrested her outside the house. Mosquera recalls It happened to hit a façade too, in a very violent way, producing a loud, impressive sound – even if the place was crowded, a general silence prevailed in the street. It was as if that sound of the books’ blow against the wall would have compressed in one single bang all of the volume’s content, summarizing the 100-hour reading of the book that had just been performed. (Mosquera 2015) Voicing one’s concerns loudly in public is often understood as an index of power. Such “volume politics” seem to still “sometimes dominate the leftist imagination of a revolution” (Li 2011, 31). The bang of the book smashing against a wall and hitting the concrete is a performative sound, which makes tangible the (im)possibility of subverting and resisting the oppression of marginalised voices, and how modes of subversion and resistance are indeed entangled with regimes of representation, coloniality and language. In closing this chapter, I want to gesture towards the more than 50-year-old political theory of the book: we do, indeed, “live in Arendtian times” (Damian Martin and Schmidt 2019, 1). Arendt’s analyses of ethnic nationalism and altright politics, as well as her writing about the predicament of refugees and their lack of rights and legal recognition are “sceptical of disciplinary labels” (Damian Martin and Schmidt 2019, 2) and are thus more relevant than ever. Arendt’s concept of the “right to have rights” as presented in The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt 1986, 296–297) proves productive in shedding light on our contemporary envisioning of human rights as well as on the pressing claims made by refugees, asylum seekers and stateless people to human rights, which

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often go unheard. In light of Arendt’s f light to the USA from the Nazi regime and the wider structural and political consequences of World War II, she writes: We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organised political community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation. (Arendt 1986, 296–297) Refugees, asylum seekers and stateless peoples are, by definition, not inherently protected by any civic law. Arendt’s call for a right to have rights points precisely to a necessary shift from the metaphysical question of “what grounds human rights” towards a practice-based one around what imagines, sustains and invigorates human rights today (Gündoğdu 2015, 180). Any presumed or celebrated universality of human rights therefore certainly merits rigorous re-examination in the face of contemporary understandings of European borders and migration movements, of dictatorship, racial surveillance capitalism and legacies of colonialism and empire. Universality in this case means questioning the representation of human rights, the legislative form of human rights as part of a set world order, rather than putting the concept of human rights itself at stake. From this perspective, it is notions of bodily integrity, empathy, compassion and sensibility which shape the cultural experience, practice and understanding of human rights. The 100-hour-long reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism or the contested work at Immigrant Movement International makes viscerally clear that the bodily frailty, racialisation and co-dependency of all human beings must be acknowledged in any contemporary and future thinking about human rights. What is to be done then? Although this question opened the chapter, my conclusion does not offer a definitive answer. Theatre and performance, as in the case of Bruguera’s work and others presented throughout this book, create manifold and often contradictory answers to the question by virtue of their showing doing. They urge audiences and participants to act politically. However, in my review of contemporary artistic and scholarly work on this pressing question in light of the so-called refugee crisis, I have shown that an explicit European focus is indeed complicit in the ongoing racialisation of refugees and the pervasive legacies of the colonial project. To talk of Europe in a moment of exacerbating xenophobia, racial inequality and border militarisation is to talk of an imagined geopolitical space, albeit with clear-cut legal nation-state territories and border zones. Instead, we need to be talking of shared histories of movements, struggles for equality and recognition and human inter-relationality beyond political identity markers only. In regard to the artivist work Immigrant Movement International, this chapter makes evident that it is exactly the gesture of those crossing borders without permission who, both full of hope and desperation, reclaim the “experience of sharing the world, no matter how inegalitarian or violent this may be” (Agier 2016, 75).

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References Agier, Michel, Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition, Cambridge: Polity Press (2016). Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcout Brace Jovanovich (1986). Bala, Sruti, “Decolonising Theatre and Performance Studies: Tales from the Classroom”, Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies 20.3 (2017): 333–345. https://doi.org/10.5117/ TVGN2017.3.BALA Barriuso, Rodrigo, Tania Bruguera. Beyond the Political, Towards Collective Decoloniality, MA Thesis, Toronto: OCAD University (2017). Birnbaum, Daniel, Connie Butler, Suzanne Cotter and Bice Curiger, Defining Contemporary Art: 25 Years in 200 Pivotal Works, London: Phaidon (2011). Bishop, Claire, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”, October 110 (2004): 51–79. https://doi.org/10.1162/0162287042379810 Bishop, Claire, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London/ New York: Verso (2011). Brown, Wendy, “Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights”, in: Janet Halley and Wendy Brown (eds.), Left Legalism/Left Critique, New York: Duke University Press (2002), 420–434. Bruguera, Tania, “Arte Útil” (n.d.), http://www.arte-util.org/about/colophon/ (accessed 28 April 2020). Bruguera, Tania, “Audience as Allies, Witnesses, and Enemies”, Gesellschaftsspiele: The Art of Assembly (2022), https://art-of-assembly.net/podcast/xiv-audienceas-allies-witnesses-and-enemies-claire-bishop-tania-bruguera-ann-liv-youngf lorian-malzacher/ (accessed 9 Aug 2022). Bruguera, Tania, “Immigrant Movement International” (2011), http://immigrantmovement.us/wordpress/about/ (accessed 28 April 2020). Bruguera, Tania, “Tania Bruguera. Interview with Jeanette Petrik”, in: Teresa Brayshaw, Anna Fenemore and Noel Witts (eds.), The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader, New York: Routledge (2020b), 78–86. Bruguera, Tania, Tania Bruguera in Conversation with/en Conversación con Claire Bishop, New York: Fundación Cisneros (2020a). Bruguera, Tania, and Francesca di Nardo, “Arte de Conducta”, Janus 1.22 (2007), 79–83. https://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/files/francesca_di_nardo.pdf Bruguera, Tania, and Patricia Vasquez, “Tania Bruguera”, Open Engagement Conference Program, New York: Portland State University (2012), 29–30. Camnitzer, Luis, “Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #6 and the Hannah Arendt International Institute for Artivism”, Art Agenda (2015), https://www. art-agenda.com/features/237341/tania-bruguera-s-tatlin-s-whisper-6-andthe-hannah-arendt-international-institute-for-artivism (accessed 28 April 2020). Cox, Emma, “Victimhood, Hope and the Refugee Narrative: Affective Dialectics in Magnet Theatre’s Every Year, Every Day, I am Walking”, Theatre Research International 37.2 (2012): 118–133. https://doi.org/10.1017/S030788331200003X Cox, Emma and Marilena Zaroulia, “Mare Nostrum, or On Water Matters”, Performance Research 21.2 (2016): 141–149. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2016.1175724 Cullen, Deborah (ed.), Arte [No Es] Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas 1960–2000, New York: El Museo Del Barrio (2008).

Human rights and European bordering  39 Curía, Dolores, “Ethics of Provocation: Tania Bruguera Turns Spectators into Citizens”, Página 12 (25 Sep 2009), http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/index. php?article_id=245&clang=0 (accessed 28 April 2020). Damian Martin, Diana, and Theron Schmidt, “Sites of Appearance, Matters of Thought: Hannah Arendt and Performance Philosophy”, Performance Philosophy 5.1 (2019): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2019.51291 Danewid, Ida, “White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History”, Third World Quarterly 38.7 (2017): 1674–1689. https://doi.org /10.1080/01436597.2017.1331123 Elgot, Jessica, “Charity Behind Migrant-Rescue Boats Sees 15-Fold Rise in Donations in 24 Hours”, Guardian (3 Sep 2015), https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2015/sep/03/charity-behind-migrant-rescue-boats-sees-15-fold-rise-indonations-in-24-hours (accessed 3 Aug 2018). Feiss, Ellen C., “What is Useful? The paradox of rights in Tania Bruguera’s ‘Useful Art’”, Art & Education (2013), https://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/files/2012_-_ what_is_action-ellen_feiss-eng_2.pdf (accessed 28 April 2020). Fusco, Coco, Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, London: Routledge (2000). Fusco, Coco, “The State of Detention: Performance, Politics, and the Cuban Public”, E-flux (3 Jan 2015), https://www.e-f lux.com/announcements/30175/on-thedetention-of-cuban-artist-tania-bruguera-by-coco-fusco/ (accessed 28 April 2020). Gluhović, Milija, Performing European Memories: Trauma, Ethics, Politics, Basingstoke/ New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2013). Gogarty, Larne Abse, “‘Usefulness’ in Contemporary Art and Politics”, Third Text 31.1 (2017), 117–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2017.1364920 Gündoğdu, Ayten, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants, New York: Oxford University Press USA (2015). Helguera, Pablo, “Portfolio: The Art and Activism of Tania Bruguera”, America’s Quarterly (2016), http://www.americasquarterly.org/content/portfolio-taniabruguera (accessed 28 April 2020). Jackson, Shannon, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, London: Routledge (2011). Jeffers, Alison, Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2012). Jestrović, Silvija, Performance, Space, Utopia: Cities of War, Cities of Exile, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2013). Jestrović, Silvija, and Ameet Parameswaran, “Worksites of the left”, Studies in Theatre and Performance 39.3 (2019): 217–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2019.165 4307 Kennedy, Duncan, “The Critique of Rights in Critical Legal Studies”, in: Wendy Brown and Janet Halley (eds.), Left Legalism/Left Critique, New York: Duke University Press (2002), 178–228. Kershaw, Alex, “Immigrant Movement International: Five Years and Counting”, Field: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism (2015): 11–26. http://field-journal. com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/FIELD-01-Bruguera-Interview.pdf Lavery, Carl, “Introduction: Performance and Ecology –What Can Theatre Do?”, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 20.3 (2016): 229–236. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 14688417.2016.1206695

40  Human rights and European bordering Li, Xinghua, “Whispering: The Murmur of Power in a Lo-Fi World”, Media, Culture and Society 33.1 (2011): 19–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443710385498 Malzacher, Florian (ed.), Truth is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics, Berlin: Sternberg Press (2014). Malzacher, Florian, Elke van Campenhout and Lilia Mestre (eds.), Turn, Turtle! Reenacting the Institute, Berlin: Alexander Verlag (2016). Marschall, Anika, “Like a Whisper: Rethinking the Politics of Voice and Performance with Tania Bruguera”, Critical Stages 24 (2021): https://www.critical-stages. org/24/like-a-whisper-rethinking-the-politics-of-voice-and-performance-withtania-bruguera/ Marschall, Anika, “The State at Play? Notions of State(less)ness in Contemporary Interventionist Performances”, Critical Stages 14 (2016), http:// www.critical-stages.org/14/the-state-at-play-notions-of-statelessness-incontemporary-interventionist-performances/ ­ Marschall, Anika, “What can Theatre do about the Refugee Crisis? Enacting Commitment and Navigating Complicity in Performative Interventions”, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 23.2 (2018): 148– 116. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2018.1438180 Neimanis, Astrida, “No Representation without Colonisation? (Or, Nature Represents Itself )”, Somatechnics 5.2 (2015): 135–153. https://doi.org/10.3366/ soma.2015.0158 Neufeld, Jonathan, “Aesthetic Disobedience”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73.2 (2015): 115–125. https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12157 Nyong’o, Tavia, Afro-Fabulations. The Queer Drama of Black Life, New York: New York University Press (2019). O’Gorman, Róisín, and Margaret Werry (eds.), “Introduction: On Failure (On Pedagogy): Editorial Introduction”, Performance Research 17.1 (2012): 1–8. https://doi. org/10.1080/13528165.2012.651857 Pratt, Geraldine, and Caleb Johnston, Migration in Performance: Crossing the Colonial Present, New York: Routledge (2019). Robbins, Christa Noel, “Tania Bruguera: The Structure of Address after the Participatory Turn”, Minnesota Review 85 (2015): 170–179. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/ article/602377 Rosero, Andrés David Montenegro, “Arte de Conducta: On Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper Series”, in: Charlotte Bonham-Carter and Nicola Mann (eds.), Rhetoric, Social Value and the Arts: But How Does it Work? New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2017), 85–106. Scarabicchi, Caterina, “Migration Manifestos in the 2010s: Performing Border Dissent between Social Action and Utopia”, Language and Intercultural Communication 20.2 (2020): 141–152. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2020.1722143 Smith, Terry, Contemporary Art: World Currents, London: Lawrence King (2011). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1999). Stierl, Maurice, Migrant Resistance in Contemporary Europe, London/New York: Routledge (2019). Taylor, Diana, and Roselyn Costantino (eds.), Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform, Durham, NC: Duke University Press (2003). Tello, Verónica, “The Speculative Collectivity of the Global Transnational, or, Social Practice and the International Division of Labour”, in: Peter Eckersall and

Human rights and European bordering  41 Helena Grehan (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics, London/ New York: Routledge (2019), 151–155. Thompson, James, Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2009). Thompson, Nato (ed.), “Living as Form”, in: Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011, Cambridge/London: MIT Press (2012), 16–33. Vujanović, Ana, “Second-hand Knowledge”, in: Bojana Cvejić and Goran Sergej Pristaš (eds.), Parallel Slalom: A Lexicon of Non-aligned Poetics, Belgrade: Walking Theory (2013), 120–130. World Cities Culture Forum, “Immigrant Movement International” (2014), http://www.worldcitiescultureforum.com/case_studies/immigrant-movementinternational (accessed 10 Sep 2020).

2

The Centre for Political Beauty

Seeking political solutions in the theatre On 13 November 2015, the play 2099 by the Centre for Political Beauty was performed at Theater Dortmund in Germany. The play portrays four white, male philosophers travelling back in time from an apocalyptic future to caution humanity against its current actions. Its opening features a looped reading of Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Das Gedächtnis der Menschheit”, which warns humanity of its ignorance and political apathy. Part of the metatheatrical dramaturgy relies on the play’s dialogues, which address the theatre audience as part of that very humanity: the actors call them to action, demanding that they enact human rights as a preventive force against future violence and wars. More specifically, the characters do not assume that they have the right answers, but in time travel story-mode, they tell the audience that they should at least try to act different to what they are doing now: simply sitting there, watching political theatre. After seeing the performance, I attended a post-show audience discussion, which lasted for more than two hours. During the post-performance discussion, members of the white majority, non-refugee audience, including myself, commented on the performance’s transformative effect, noting that they still felt highly stimulated by the play. Some explained that they felt personally addressed when the characters called for the audience to take action – demanding that they do something about the so-called refugee crisis, rather than go to the theatre. A critical and emotional turn occurred in this discussion when many of the audience members asked the question “what is to be done then?”. Almost desperately, they asked the dramaturg and the four actors what they should do in the face of the refugee crisis. Both, actors and other audience members began to answer, by enthusiastically describing their voluntary outreach work for local refugee shelters, and their participation among the welcoming crowds who greeted refugees arriving at local train stations. In this lively discussion, the actors and dramaturg were often confused with the absent playwrights – the Centre for Political Beauty. They had to explain that they were not part of this performance collective, being employed

DOI: 10.4324/9781003110293-3

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instead by the municipal Theater Dortmund. They were not working alongside or for the performance collective but were simply employed to act in the commissioned play 2099. This took several minutes of patient explanation, as the cast and dramaturg elucidated the differences between their subjectivities on and off stage, and separated themselves from the absent members of the Centre for Political Beauty, whose political messages they were delivering through the performance. This misunderstanding on the part of many audience members marked a critical political turn in the discussion. It also speaks to the strong impact of the affective public image that the Centre for Political Beauty has created of themselves. The post-performance discussion, then, revealed that many audience members mistakenly thought they were meeting the Centre for Political Beauty, and saw this as an opportunity to talk back to this collective. This ref lects the power of the collective’s artistic imagery, which evidently encouraged an understanding that they would have pragmatic political answers for their audience. The audience apparently expected a kind of blueprint for specific political action – as the collective has indeed offered in several other interventions outside of the theatre. The example of Centre for Political Beauty’s 2099 shows how contemporary, and perhaps in particular, white majority audiences with European citizenship may turn towards the theatre for straightforward political guidance. They hope that this cultural institution can tell them how to respond to the so-called refugee crisis and the kind of political action they should take. One could argue that this demonstrates a shift in the role of the artist towards that of political guide or politico-legal expert. It is striking how the search for political guidance has become more urgent and widespread within the theatrical sphere more generally.

Introduction to the Centre for Political Beauty This chapter interrogates how the Centre for Political Beauty performs human rights. Formed in 2009 and based in Berlin, the Centre for Political Beauty is a German-speaking performance collective made up of around 70 activists, artists and lawyers. With their interventions, the Centre for Political Beauty seeks to challenge current policies on migration, laws on asylum and notions of statelessness. By always creating an ambiguous realm at the crossroads of the arts, politics and law, the collective questions the ethics and political engagement of its audiences. They aim to galvanise audiences to action around safeguarding human rights and to challenge people’s “political apathy”. The Centre for Political Beauty wants its interventions to raise awareness of human rights issues, while its artistic rhetoric and imagery are always controversial. Their interventions rely upon provoking media outrage, often creating emotional spectacles that even extend beyond German borders. In 2014, the Centre for Political Beauty’s performance, Kindertransporthilfe (Kindertransport aid) re-enacted the Kindertransport, in which the British

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government saved approximately 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from the Nazi regime. In their intervention, the collective campaigned for a similar movement and launched a mock webpage, telephone hotlines and databases that mimicked Germany’s Federal Ministry for Family Affairs. With this campaigning effort, the artists looked for volunteer families to provide shelter and become foster parents to 55,000 refugee children from Syria. The same year, their intervention Erster Europäischer Mauerfall  (The First Fall of the European Wall 2014)  tackled the statelessness of migrants who attempt the perilous journey towards Europe and across various borders (Marschall 2016, 2020). Protesting the Dublin Regulation and the European border zone’s increasing militarisation, the Centre for Political Beauty announced that they would commit the serious crime of tearing down the European border fences in Greece. With their performative intervention Jean-Monnet-Brücke ( Jean Monnet Bridge 2015), the collective launched a project, purportedly run by the Austrian government, to build a bridge across the Mediterranean Sea from Morocco to Italy. Through a mock Austrian government web page, the Centre for Political Beauty solicited donations from private supporters which eventually led to a symbolic f loating rescue platform being installed in the Mediterranean. In their 2016 intervention Flüchtlinge Fressen (Eating Refugees), artists from the collective installed a huge cage containing four Libyan tigers in an outdoor space next to the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. Against the backdrop of the political deal between Turkey and the EU for Turkey to accept deported migrants in exchange for financial investment, the artists protested the restrictions on immigration imposed by the German federal government. The Syrian actress May Skaf publicly announced that she would let herself be eaten by the tigers if there was not a parliamentary vote against this policy. These interventions employ forms of subversion that challenge ideas of what can be rendered as artistic symbolic gesture and as political reality; in doing so, they create possibilities for political change but also suggest dangers of racial tokenisation, instrumentalisation and de-humanisation. Crucially, the collective does not prove the reality of their artworks by providing documentary evidence. Instead, they rely on the playful and vague idea of “truism”, a theatrical suspension of disbelief. This sets them apart from documentary theatre practices as well as NGOs, which operate primarily through a commonly established practice of mobilising documentary facts to evidence crimes against humanity. The Centre for Political Beauty’s strategic positioning of itself in the artistic realm means they can to some extent operate extra-legally the artistic realm functions as a sort of argumentative loophole for the Centre for Political Beauty, providing it with a seemingly safe space governed by rules other than those of the legal realm. By framing its direct actions theatrically, it strategically evokes the artistic freedom of expression. However, this move is often contested by federal police forces, who have repeatedly prohibited the

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public display of, and participatory engagement with, their interventions. Moreover, political conservatives and elected fascists in German parliament have ordered criminal investigations into the collective’s artists. As counter-action, the Centre for Political Beauty has used these investigations as additional material in its interventions, imbibing political responses into its dramaturgy: it digitally distributes and widely publishes the relevant legal documents and official state correspondence on its social media pages. In the first half, this chapter discusses the Centre for Political Beauty’s aesthetics and artistic legacies, and in the second half, this chapter undertakes an in-depth analysis of one of their interventions into the European border regime: The Dead Are Coming.

A radical cultural response to political apathy The Centre for Political Beauty bases its agency and objectives in the notion that, due to the historic legacy of the Holocaust, they are obliged to do anything in their power to prevent future genocides from happening. Based on that historical debt, the ideology that compels the collective’s artworks is rooted in a national rather than a universal framing of humanitarian discourse. In their manifesto, they clearly address Germany as their target audience: The Centre for Political Beauty is an assault team that establishes moral beauty, political poetry and human greatness while aiming to preserve humanitarianism. The group’s basic understanding is that the legacy of the Holocaust is rendered void by political apathy, the rejection of refugees and cowardice. It believes that Germany should not only learn from its history but also take action. (Centre for Political Beauty 2016) Rhetorically, they title and announce their interventions in a way that is specific to German history, often referencing German national figures or political motifs. In addition, they schedule their interventions to coincide with public holidays, anniversaries, or commemorations, strategically establishing links between contemporary political issues and historical events enshrined in national collective memory. Ref lecting their ideological mission, the collective’s name suggests their notion of beauty as one localised within a purist, centralised and architectural form. Their name and mission statement invoke notions of aesthetic beauty, posited as something that underlies truth and morality. Beauty, they argue, has the potential to educate and shape the people (or rather, the nation) into moral and politicised citizens. Their mission statement does not assert an explicitly socialist or left-wing agenda (distinguishing them from other figures and groups in the political art scene), but promotes the idea that political art ought to be aggressive, that it “must hurt, provoke and rise in revolt” (Centre for Political Beauty 2016). The Centre for Political Beauty criticises

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NGOs for promoting human rights only through the public dissemination of images and information – an approach which, they argue, is inadequate at preventing violence – and claim that their own interventions represent the most effective means available to “build people of exceptional moral quality” (Centre for Political Beauty 2016). Despite its claimed humanitarian ethos, the Centre for Political Beauty perpetuates an idea of morality deeply embedded in imperial structures, which does not allow space for alterity and difference beyond racialised notions of victimhood and deservingness. Their interventions problematically reproduce a double-edged understanding of refugees as vulnerable victims, and their mission statement, narratives and social imagination are complicit with neo-colonial regimes of representation – even as they deem European policies responsible for the impossibility to grieve for refugees by European citizens. Moreover, the artists claim Germany to be an “eldorado for human rights” while uncritically reproducing the fantasy of a white male savior who heroically responds to the plight of the weak. It is not the role models as such but rather their invocation within a framing that juxtaposes European saviours with non-European victims that thereby raises the specter of a colonial and patronizing “white man’s burden”. (Bieberstein and Evren 2016, 467) As self-proclaimed human rights agents, the Centre for Political Beauty presents a predominantly white, cis-gendered, middle-class, able-bodied and intellectual cast. Their rhetoric performs a self-righteous form of moral superiority and frames their work as a response to a re-emergence of the political apathy which characterised the post-war 1950s in Germany. What makes their interventions compelling is their ethical and political ambiguity: without making use of cultural irony, they co-opt much of the vocabulary of real political campaigns but distort and invert it. Crucially, the Centre for Political Beauty does not collaborate with activist groups or NGOs which campaign for the legalisation of undocumented migrants and the protection of refugee rights. Even though their interventions take place in public, the collective does not interact with their audiences, nor engage in public dialogue outside their theatrical frame. Across the range of interviews they have given to major television stations and newspapers, their spokespersons always maintain their public personae, repeating the rhetoric of the mission statement. Their double-edged objective “to shape a new human being” acts as a theatrical and political provocation and invites political analysis of their interventions. While often aimed at evoking empathy, however, this social ideal of a homogeneous “us” and “them” has the tendency to render postmigrant presences invisible. It must be remembered that Germany has a pluralistic public sphere, and the collective’s audiences therefore include people who have experienced war,

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discrimination, poverty, structural racism and social exclusion (see also Sharifi 2011; Simke 2016). The Centre for Political Beauty operates in a “war of position” (Castañeda and Holmes 2016, 2), in which crisis momentum is perpetuated through emotionally heated public debates. News reports in Europe had covered the so-called refugee crisis on a daily basis around 2015, but the discourse around this crisis could also be experienced through social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Reddit or YouTube, as well as in everyday meetings with colleagues, friends and family members. The crisis was and is still being framed as a political moment by powerful agents and discourses, in which hegemony and the architecture of our social worlds are at stake and future structural and symbolic realities are unknown. To situate this political context, I refer to Seth Holmes and Heide Castañeda’s work on demarcating representations of refugees in media and political discourse in relation to Germany: Exercising often controversial leadership as Europe’s largest economy, Germany played an especially important role in responding to the crisis in the summer and fall of 2015, occupying an important political and rhetorical position within media narratives. […] Germany has responded with an ambivalent hospitality that is uniquely nuanced and conditioned by memories (and some present-day realities) of xenophobia and fascism. (Castañeda and Holmes 2016, 2) Holmes and Castañeda examine how refugees are morally framed by a public discourse of deservingness, which shifts responsibility strategically from powerful institutions and political actors onto those who require their human rights be safeguarded. What becomes evident in the Centre for Political Beauty’s interventions is that the so-called refugee crisis could also be described as “a crisis of European solidarity” (UNHRC 2016). In terms of managing such a politically sustained crisis, whereas Australia’s asylum policies suggest an “explicitly militaristic muscular approach […] which is also aspirational in its unequivocal conception of what nationhood means” (Cox and Zaroulia 2016, 142), European states, while similarly reactionary, also have attempted to maintain a “narrative of liberal, human rights-driven hospitality” (Cox and Zaroulia 2016, 142). Within this climate of ongoing crisis, supranational negotiation of human rights, and hegemonic aspirations, the Centre for Political Beauty intervenes with their own ideology-driven narrative of human rights. They hold Germany accountable for its historic leadership role within the European Union during the renegotiation of the key EU procedure of the Dublin Regulation in 2015 and 2016. Moreover, the group “produces its own accounts of the crisis in its actions and on its website, challenging dominant communicable models in which state officials and journalists are the primary subjects who can speak the truth” (Castañeda and Holmes 2016, 15).

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Digital approaches to performing: distributed aesthetics Contemporary writing about performance art in the form of reviews, criticism, or on social media can no longer be understood as something separate from the temporary aesthetic event. Instead, this public sphere should be seen as an intricate part of performance art itself. This is evident in the Centre for Political Beauty’s work, which confounds the more traditional notion of theatre as a live event that can only ever be truly experienced in the actual participatory encounter between performers and spectators. Inasmuch as its interventions blur the thresholds of arts and politics, of live event and media rapport, it specifically speaks to wider emerging questions around documenting performance, research methodologies in the field of theatre and performance research, and what theatre and liveness mean more generally in an era of new technologies. Many contemporary understandings of theatre are precisely based upon its ephemerality and liveness – theatre as the art form and medium through which we experience the unfolding reciprocal exchange of emotions and affects with people around us. The Centre for Political Beauty contests this understanding of performance, by addressing a multiplicity of audiences who either take an active role as live participants or become engaged by very different means of dramaturgical ephemera (as I did myself ). In doing so, the Centre for Political Beauty creates a distributed aesthetics, which blends theatre as a live storytelling event and theatre as a space for continued conf lictual multimedia debate, reaching beyond a live theatre that merely “preaches to the converted”. In The Theatrical Public Sphere (2014), Christopher Balme begins his analysis of distributed aesthetics by provocatively questioning artists’ political efficacy: [s]ince theatre artists cannot realistically be expected to chain themselves to Japanese whaling ships, at least not in their capacities as actors, and most theatre is highly local in concrete spatial terms, must we leave these issues and spheres of activity to political activists? (Balme 2014, 176) He responds by recalling theatre’s important capacity to create a public sphere both inside and outside of the theatre, emphasising that theatre can merge ethics and aesthetics “to find the most potent intervention for a particular issue” (Balme 2014, 177). Balme argues that distributed aesthetics is paradigmatic for contemporary and future European theatre, which he sees as a sphere that is increasingly trying to reclaim its political relevance (Balme 2010, 47). Distributed aesthetics demonstrate how the Centre for Political Beauty’s interventions are indeed paradigmatic for contemporary and future political theatre in Europe: they gain their affective gravitas first and foremost through performing across different media platforms and actual sites. They

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simultaneously perform locally, co-presently, immediately and as an ongoing, open-ended network of multimedia communication. Such a shift in aesthetics from immersive, site-specific, participatory and socially engaged art forms towards a networked culture blurs the live embodied encounter through other means of affective engagement. I therefore identify the Centre for Political Beauty’s interventions as distributed aesthetics: aesthetic forms which offer no single-end viewpoint, but rather an endlessly dispersed fragmentation of media practices and mediated experiences. Distributed aesthetics describe a complex ecology of performing in contemporary arts, which makes tangible the limits and ethico-political complexity of human perceptions and sheds light upon the affective power of the Centre for Political Beauty’s multimedia approach. The performance collective blurs presumed dichotomies between the factual and the imaginary, in part by limiting the amount of material released which documents their interventions. It is a distinctive feature of its dramaturgy that, in terms of both temporality and importance, it is always unclear what comes first: the live embodied intervention event itself, or the visionary proposal and media aftermath of the event? Or more simply put, in any attempt to define the theatre in such ways some degree of failure is inevitable. Engagement with various forms of dramaturgical ephemera can, in different ways, be as theatrical as a live embodied encounter with performing artists. Such ephemera include live tweeting and social media posts, found video footage, hyperlinks to related artworks, or interviews with artists conducted by journalists, art critics and citizen reporters. However, what is important to note about the Centre for Political Beauty’s growing digital archive is that the documentation, which they themselves edit and make public for their audiences, changes slightly with every new website update. Over the period that I have been using the collective’s website for my research (since 2015), it has repeatedly changed its representations of their corporate identity, iconography and interventions. The German-to-English translations of their mission statement and performance descriptions have also changed, and citations of media responses to their interventions have been updated. While time stamping is key to my continued engagement with this online archive, these changes also speak to the artists’ own narrative development: between my first engagement with their interventions in 2014 and writing this chapter in 2020, their work on the intersection between performance art and asylum has proliferated, particularly with regards to European geopolitics. Nevertheless, beyond abstract facts and figures, both scholarly and creative accounts still struggle to comprehend the magnitude and dimensions of the situation in Europe in terms of people fleeing conflict and seeking asylum. In this context, the process of analysing the Centre for Political Beauty’s interventions is becoming ever more challenging, but it also highlights how wide-ranging and compelling their interventions are. I find their interventions problematic and productive to examine issues of white saviourism and white innocence, racial commodification and institutional racism. Therefore, it is necessary to examine

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how they portray themselves as human rights agents in relation to a theatrical public sphere that has arguably become more aware of geopolitical complicities, and more used to the figuration and image-making of refugees across various media. Instead of “preaching to the converted”, the multimedia distribution and dramaturgical ephemera make it possible for the Centre for Political Beauty to address society at large and create a public sphere which questions the very definition of theatre and the very form of the public sphere itself.

Art activism and artist legacies Much like Tania Bruguera’s work, the Center for Political Beauty has re-invigorated discussions and theories about the intersection of art and politics, and the related discourse of art activism, which are nothing new. Intervention as a form of art activism has been discussed from various perspectives: political philosophy (Mouffe 2008), cultural studies (Kuryel and Firat 2011; Shepard 2011), performance studies (Bogad 2015; Lichtenfels and Rouse 2013; Serafini 2018), politics (Rai and Reinelt 2014; Sholette 2010), anthropology (Flynn and Tinius 2015) and as practice-based fieldwork in the form of workshops, training, or seminars. Artistic interventions that move outside of theatre institutions blur the boundaries between the artistic, political and legal realms. It is telling that Amnesty International even encourages its members, artists, political representatives and all those interested in engaging others in human rights discourse to use the means of theatre interventions rather than traditional campaigning and politicking (Amnesty International n.d.). The Center for Political Beauty’s interventions are inherently driven by the artists’ intricate knowledge of law and legal procedures. Yet, the Centre for Political Beauty’s interventions originate in an “antipolitical sphere” (Bieberstein and Evren 2016, 471) outside of conventional legal, parliamentary and media boundaries, in which politics is otherwise imagined, carried out and represented. The group does not collaborate with other NGOs or initiatives and does not make public the planning or preparation of their interventions. It is revealing that the artists label their work as “Aktionen” (literally meaning actions, interventions), but translate this into the English term “artworks” (Centre for Political Beauty 2016). Their own non-literal translation highlights the distinctively artistic character of their works; it suggests that they do not want to be seen as part of more pragmatic social justice movements, in which performance art is often seen as relevant only insofar as it contributes to other forms of direct action – as a way of making protests more playful and enjoyable, for example. By identifying their interventions as “artworks”, these artists invoke a historical lineage of artistic interventions as a response to the much-questioned legitimacy of activist art. The Centre has limited state funding, but its distributed aesthetics approach allows the group to design crowdfunding campaigns. To a large extent, the interventions are financed by their audiences. This kind of financial backing could also be framed as an artistic rather than merely economic legitimisation from their audiences to make planned interventions possible in the first place.

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The art activism by Centre for Political Beauty draws on the legacy and performative strategies of the artist Christoph Schlingensief. The collective explicitly name Schlingensief as a role model in their manifesto, and their spokesperson Philipp Ruch used to work for him as an assistant. Schlingensief has transformed the development of contemporary political theatre in German-speaking culture in the early twenty-first century. “Schlingensief ’s answer to the famous political question What’s to be done? was simple: Anything! In his own words: Do something, it doesn’t matter what, the main thing is to do something – even if it fails” (Karschnia 2015, 162). The range of political issues Schlingensief addressed through his interventions includes the increasing electoral success of fascist right-wing parties, homelessness, ableism and his battle with cancer. His performance intervention Bitte liebt Ősterreich! (2000) tackled the contemporary fascist Austrian government and mobilised a wide range of audiences both live and across various media. The intervention has entered the scholarly field of theatre and migration as an important example for negotiation the contentious relations between asylum politics, policing of borders, media spectacle and performativity. As Schlingensief, the Centre for Political Beauty makes use of multimedia and ambiguous theatrical frames to undermine political regimes representation. They bring different representational regimes into contact with one another – arts, migration, politics and law. The Centre for Political Beauty considers Schlingensief a virtuoso among human rights activists, one who knew how to make use of artistic strategies to position himself within the artistic realm and avoid becoming subject to legal prosecution, despite the radicality of his interventions. While Schlingensief ’s interventions have always consciously approached the issue at hand from manifold angles, the Centre for Political Beauty rhetorically aims at definite political outcomes and pedagogically instructs their audiences how to act; they offer them what is apparently the best solution to the political problem at hand. The political stakes are high in the Centre for Political Beauty’s intervention The Dead Are Coming (2015), which takes centre stage in the following. It shows how the artists confound aesthetics and ethics, and how they muddy the artistic and politico-legal realms, raising questions about the representational regimes at work in both: What kind of ethical issues are at stake in the Centre for Political Beauty’s “artworks”? In what ways are their legal, political and performative frictions productive for addressing issues of human rights? How do they deal with questions of responsibility, imperialist guilt, institutional racism and de-humanisation, when it comes to their rendering of refugees as grievable subjects? The Dead Are Coming In 2015, the Centre for Political Beauty performed the intervention The Dead Are Coming. This involved exhuming the bodies of refugees who had drowned in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Europe from mass graves in Italy. The Centre for Political Beauty identified the bodies with the help of local

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forensic experts and asked their relatives’ permission to take them to Berlin, where they would be reburied in a public ceremony in the German capital, in “the symbolic centre of Fortress Europe” (Cox and Zaroulia 2016, 141). While it also crosses the political, legal and artistic realms, the intervention responds to the so-called refugee crisis and EU border regime by foregrounding the role of collective grief and commemoration of those who perished in the Mediterranean Sea. It provoked international media outrage but also created what I will call ethical disfluency: an ethical stuttering fuelled by the inability to articulate the ethical matters at stake, because of the absence of existing formulas to negotiate the “disconcerting multivalency” (Cox and Zaroulia 2016, 146) of politics, art, activism and religion. The title of a performance is often the first thing we see or hear of it, and The Dead Are Coming is effective in this respect, as a title that has disconcerting, uncanny and prophetic qualities. The collective presented the title in images recalling the EU f lag, using blue with yellow stars. Considered in the context of the artwork, the title seems to be literally invasive: The Dead Are Coming has a visceral quality and it foreshadows some of the matters at stake in the intervention, such as migrant arrival, othering, alienation and potential for grief. The title points to a dystopian future which could potentially be averted through preventive action in the present; the dead are yet to come, so there is time to prepare for their arrival. It also prompts questions: Who might the dead be? What kind of supernatural force brings them? Where do they go?

Mechanisms of European border protection The Centre for Political Beauty announced The Dead Are Coming in the summer of 2015, at a time when the public perception of the so-called refugee crisis was heightening and taking shape, as noted above. The UN Refugee Agency reports that during the summer of 2015 more than one million people f led to Europe across the Mediterranean Sea (UNHCR 2017). Those who survived the sea passage often continued from Greece northwards through the western Balkan states. In response to the rise of refugees crossing these states, several EU countries, including Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia, began to strictly police their borders and refuse entry to refugees; in doing so, they broke with the Schengen Treaty and Europe’s multilateral political union on these issues began to fragment. While in the summer of 2015, German political representatives stressed that the Dublin Regulation was still intact and EU countries needed to abide by it, in August 2015 the German chancellor Angela Merkel suspended the Dublin Regulation and announced a unilateral open-arms policy because of the humanitarian emergency at hand. She had German border controls suspended on an ad hoc basis, and she publicly announced that refugees from Syria in particular would be allowed to claim asylum in Germany despite having entered other European countries first (Hall and Lichfield 2015). Images on social media soon began to circulate portraying Merkel as a heroic mother

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figure. However, Merkel’s actions caused severe political conf lict among her own political party, the parliament and the public. Local shelters, detention centres, immigration offices and humanitarian organisations soon seemed to reach the limit of their capacity to deal professionally with the number of people who arrived in need of care. Consequently, temporary border controls between Austria and Germany were put back in place by the Minister for the Interior in September 2015. In 2015, the Council of Europe called an extraordinary meeting to address the limitations of EU migration and asylum policy. Although EU leaders agreed to provide substantial financial support to the UNHCR and countries such as Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan, they failed to agree upon how to distribute migrants across EU member states (European Council 2015). Border protection mechanisms such as pushbacks at sea and the wilful neglect of those in need of rescue at sea were already set in place, including the Frontex-led military operations Mare Nostrum and Triton (Klepp 2013). Above all, these political and military responses to the crisis expose inner European power structures: the discrepancies between a structurally advanced European centre in terms of wealth, class and infrastructure, and its peripheries. The crisis also exposes continuing xenophobia and racist violence across Europe. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in particular, was warned by the European Commission because he suspended EU law to build a border fence along the Hungarian–Serbian border in the autumn of 2015. Early in 2016, Orbán declared a state of emergency, the Hungarian military blocked trains carrying refugees from southern countries in an attempt to starve them, and Hungarian police forces attacked ethnic minority groups (Kallius, Monterescu and Rajaram 2016). The Centre for Political Beauty aimed to confound the powerful political structures that underlie this crisis by employing an accusatory tone themselves: on their webpages, on social media and in a press release they published a news story with a headline reading “So geht Europa mit seinen Toten um!” (This is how Europe is treating its dead) above a picture showing a pile of dead refugee bodies found in a prayer room in a local hospital in Sicily, Italy. The image reveals the hospital’s inhumane, neglectful and inadequate storage conditions for dead refugee bodies outside the overcrowded morgue. Although the artists’ headline frames the whole of Europe as being responsible for this, further descriptions of the situation did in the end cast the local Mediterranean communities as bearing the sole responsibility to handle the dead, who were daily washed ashore by the hundreds during the summer of 2015. As Marilena Zaroulia notes in conversation with Emma Cox, this shows us that “Europe’s others do not only arrive in boats from the East; they also reside in the Eastern or Southern countries of the continent” (Cox and Zaroulia 2016, 144). In June 2015, around UN World Refugee Day, the Centre for Political Beauty announced their crowdfunding campaign for The Dead Are Coming on social media and through press releases. This was another example of

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Figure 2.1 Centre for Political Beauty, Die Toten Kommen, Friedhof Berlin-Gatow, Germany, 2015. Courtesy the artists. © Nick Jaussi.

an announcement timed to coincide with a historic day of remembrance in Germany, where World Refugee Day commemorates German victims of forced displacement and persecution at the end of World War II. In their announcement, the artists explained that they had undertaken 18 months of research along the borders of southern Europe to explore what had actually happened to the victims of the EU border regime. In Berlin, they held a commemoration ceremony and buried refugees who had perished in their attempt to cross the Mediterranean. Crucially, the artists once again addressed individual German state representatives, including Chancellor Angela Merkel and Minister of the Interior Thomas de Mazière. The Centre for Political Beauty invited them personally to the burial ceremony and asked them to take responsibility for the refugees’ deaths. Their campaign caused international media outrage but raised over 34,000 euros in public donations. Cynical gifts were offered in return for donations, including a mock psychiatric report on de Mazière’s mental state, the opportunity to drive an excavator during the intervention’s protest march, or a holiday weekend at the Greek–Turkish border which would include a guided tour of local gravesites.

Burying dead refugees in the heart of Europe The two burials in The Dead Are Coming were held at different graveyards in Berlin and included religious ceremonies and political convocation. In an

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uneasy entanglement of secular and sacred practices of representation, the burials were attended by activists, cultural workers, media reporters, the Centre for Political Beauty and figures including Maxim Gorki Theater director Shermin Langhoff. At the Islamic graveyard in Berlin-Gatow, the Centre for Political Beauty arranged the ceremony space in a specific artistic manner, including barrier tape marking off several rows of seats to keep journalists and photographers away from the mourning community and the service. With a prominent view of the gravesite, black office chairs were set up in neat rows and marked with reservations for the invited state representatives: Merkel and de Mazière, along with several state secretaries and ministry officials. A collection of EU f lags f lanked this seating arrangement, while in the middle of the chairs a red carpet was brought out as a path for the mourning community. Throughout the ceremony, the reserved seats remained empty. The congregation of mourners was led by an imam and six white male casket bearers dressed in black suits and white gloves. A woman wearing the veil and several men wearing takke followed. The Centre for Political Beauty were dressed in costumes well-known from their other interventions: black corporate suits with black make-up “ostentatiously signifying toil” (Cox 2017, 492) smeared on their faces. Around 150 attendees individually approached the lowered coffins and placed soil and f lowers upon them in a silent and respectful manner, but journalists and photographers continuously took shots with their cameras, pushing and shoving for the best view, and lifted up microphones to capture the few quiet murmurs and the sounds of people crying. Stefan Pelzer, the Centre for Political Beauty’s “escalation commissioner”, gave a politicised eulogy and directly addressed the media reporters present by repeatedly trying to reassure them that this was not a theatre performance but reality. Emma Cox points out that the ceremony’s “overall effect was a collision of quiet respectfulness and political radicalism, with visual juxtapositions that were f lippantly incongruous” (Cox 2017, 492). Although my primary analytic focus is on the burials themselves, I will brief ly map the following happenings of The Dead Are Coming. Only a week after the burials, the second part of the intervention included a public protest march against the German government and a hoax announcement about a commemoration memorial to all unidentified deceased refugees in front of the Chancellery. The Centre for Political Beauty claimed that it would turn the forecourt into a “superlative graveyard” and published a digital model of its size, format and design. They printed images of this model on billboards outside the Chancellery reading “[t]he European Union is constructing here” and listing hoax sponsorships by Frontex and the EU’s External Borders Fund. De Mazière was named as the building’s constructor. In addition to this hoax, the Centre for Political Beauty organised a protest march titled “Marsch der Entschlossenen” (march of the wilful subjects) on 21 June 2015. The protest march included around 5,000 people who brought spades and shovels to the Platz der Republik in Berlin, which links the German Parliament and the Chancellery. The collective released IKEA-style

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instruction manuals on how to create symbolic graves on the lawn in front of the parliament. Participants acted accordingly: they dug about a 100 graves on the lawn and decorated them with f lowers, candles and crosses crafted with small wooden sticks and inscribed with messages such as “borders kill” and “nobody is illegal”. Some of the participants performed temporary occupations of the graves. Demonstrating solidarity beyond Berlin, people also started digging symbolic graves in other cities and countries, for example in front of the British Parliament in London, and the hashtag #dietotenkommen (the dead are coming) proliferated online. The Centre for Political Beauty provides links to around 250 national and international media reports about this march on their website (Merrill 2018, 171–73). The sociologists Alice von Bieberstein and Erdem Evren argue that the practice of “improper mourning” used in The Dead Are Coming holds transgressive potential, but also makes the Centre for Political Beauty structurally “complicit in foregrounding the figure of the refugee as absolute victim while reproducing a moral positioning reminiscent of the ‘saviour hero’ imbued with all its racial and colonial connotations” (Bieberstein and Evren 2016, 470). Nonetheless, in his analysis of grief in migration activism, the cultural scientist Maurice Stierl argues that interventions such as The Dead Are Coming can be transformative because they form “impossible acts of identification”: these contestations in grief, despite remaining incomplete and fallible, form a heterological politics that seeks alternative ways of being-with one another at the margins. It is this dimension […] that distinguishes mourning mobilised as a radical political engagement with loss at borders from official practices of commemoration employed by state and EU leaders that stage selective humanitarian border spectacles. (Stierl 2016, 174) It is clear that the staged collective grieving of The Dead Are Coming employs ethically and emotionally risky strategies, in which identification remains in question. But the intervention’s transformative potential is undermined by the Centre for Political Beauty’s focus upon failed Mediterranean crossings. Situated between performance art, political assembly and religious ceremony, the intervention especially affects by engaging with the transportation and burial of a real, solid wooden casket, carrying a real drowned person. The issue at stake is the limit of intelligibility, but also a widespread cultural longing to somehow grapple with these bodies, which weigh us down because they leave no other visible social traces and suspend any possible embodied encounter: This need to communicate or convey the weightiness of the body at sea, and, in particular, the substantiality of the drowned body, also seems to speak to a representational urgency that bleeds out of the gaps and absences across visible and tangible domains in this context, where

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“irregular” maritime crossings (and failed crossings) are comprehended most often by means other than embodied encounter. (Cox and Zaroulia 2016, 146) It is this limit of intelligibility, combined with widespread cultural longing for the otherwise suspended embodied encounter, which feeds into the mode of ethical disfluency that is in The Dead Are Coming. In hindsight, the intervention still comes across as estranged, abstract, and impalpable – something that requires a longer period of critical engagement to reveal its manifold performative layers and the plethora of online dramaturgical ephemera. Beyond the questions around research ethics that interventions dealing with migration and asylum must face, The Dead Are Coming suggests a troubling ethical ambiguity, and a failure – despite its compelling sense of urgency – to respond adequately to the crisis. While engaging with the unfolding of the events through social media and drawing on distributed aesthetics, I experienced my own white savourism complex, I experienced anxiety and a visceral longing to take an active role. I continually imagined my physical presence in the intervention and felt frustratingly passive spectating upon the events from abroad. I will not analyse these affects through a phenomenological lens, because what it crucial here is the lingering academic conception of a performance as an in-situ event. As a researcher, I was being affected by “our current discourses [that] are determined by disciplinary exigencies and less by contemporary performance practice” (Balme 2008, 84). However, “the relationship between the live and the mediated is far less confrontational in artistic practice than it is in the academic discourse” (Balme 2008, 84). Helen Freshwater has taken issue with the prevalent scholarly assumption that it is important to engage audiences in a participatory way: she questions why spectating is understood as passive, untrustworthy and contemptible (Freshwater 2009, 25). Notwithstanding the rigour of distributed aesthetics, the sense of a limit, and of attempting to reach beyond the scale of my white, cis-female, abled body with European citizenship speaks to the wider issues at stake in The Dead Are Coming: a disconcerting representational urgency alongside the cultural longing for tangible cohesion.

Ethical disf luency As introduced above, my term “ethical disf luency” describes a powerful feeling that in a certain way goes against our better critical judgement: in The Dead Are Coming it is the uncomfortable friction between an uneasy moral and cultural complicity and acting otherwise in “solidarity which is rife with impossibility” (Stierl 2016, 174). Simply put, ethical disf luency is at work when working through privilege. Disf luency describes the moment of interrupting a regular comfortable f low and sense of oneself, a silent pausing and correcting of something configured previously (Fraundorf, Arnold and

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Landlois 2018). It can increase our attention to the social complexities and ethical difficulties at stake. Similarly, Judith Butler understands ethics as our engagement with an other in a moment that does not fit preconceived frameworks, when we may experience vulnerability or risk in the face of an unintelligible situation. We can create our positions anew in relation to another when we take responsibility “precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us” (Butler 2005, 136). It is exactly theatre and performance which can importantly create space for ethical disf luency: as Nicholas Ridout has argued, theatre produces ethics because “to act” implies both semblance and actual doing, and theatre has the capacity to bring about a double kind of doing, facilitating “aesthetic ethical encounter[s]” (Ridout 2009, 54). In contrast to a modernist perspective, which sees ethics as moral instruction or clearly formulated code, Ridout frames ethics as something that manifests in social encounters when we come to realise that ultimately, our relations with one another are open-ended and we are always able to act otherwise. He explains that ethics in contemporary theatre has become an issue of process and form rather than content: post-modern theatre is characterised by an “openness to the future and the unpredictable rather than a closure around a specific ethical position” (Ridout 2009, 49). Therefore, Ridout argues that the “greatest ethical potential [lies in] the moment when theatre abandons ethics” (Ridout 2009, 70) and thus makes it possible to create new and different relationships with each other. This process of relating to others becomes, in turn, “the ground upon which political action might be attempted” (Ridout 2009, 66). The Centre for Political Beauty, on the other hand, addresses clearly articulated ethical imperatives to both theatre audiences and the national government. Artistically, the intervention suspends common theatrical modes of representation. In doing so, it paradoxically creates a site of simultaneous placement and displacement. On the one hand, the intervention contests pernicious transnational policies by placing dead bodies in the body politic responsible for their rejection and exposure to danger. The burial site in Berlin becomes a site of local collective mourning which at the same time symbolises the violence of wider European “necropolitics” at work (Mbembe 2003). The dead could be understood as reclaiming a specific national territory that would otherwise remain inaccessible to them, due to legal, cultural, or social practices of exclusion. The Dead Are Coming renders the grim horror of the drowned bodies as a spectacle for our contemplation. Their material presence speaks to the tenacity of people in need of refuge, as well as to the importance of placing the dead in personalised tombs, creating a lasting commemoration site right at the political centre of the EU necropolitical border regime. “Necropolitics”, here, draws upon Achille Mbembe’s description of the racialised political violence against refugees inf licted by the EU border regime: the term denotes “racialised distinctions between nationality statuses [which] render some lives ungrievable” (Lewicki 2017, 282). Powerful

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political representatives wilfully ignore this, as they either embed the loss of refugee lives “in humanitarian narratives or silence them altogether” (Stierl 2016, 174). Our engagement with The Dead Are Coming is aesthetically inherent to the intervention, because that very engagement “is called upon to do political work” (Bal 2007, 23). The intervention does not leave us “aloof and shielded, autonomous and in charge of the aesthetic experience”, but takes us to “the heart of what matters in the contemporary” (Bal 2007, 23) world: the mobility of people and our cultural dispositions towards them, which bind them to an identity they might not claim as theirs – with often perilous consequences. Narrative and embodiment necessarily intertwine within the asylum process and within any form of theatre of migration. Thus, refugees are caught in political, legal and cultural power struggles from the moment of f light and continue to be so beyond the moment of arrival. They are systematically forced into limbo by means of border enforcement, detention and long-term social exclusion. Although The Dead Are Coming exposes this policy of border enforcement as necropolitical violence, the intervention is ethically troubling on many levels; not least because it transforms and aestheticises a dead refugee body into a lasting symbolic figure which represents the failures of the body politic. In doing so, the Centre for Political Beauty convincingly challenge state-produced grievability, but at the same time they create an aesthetic spectacle which perpetuates much of the representational regimes that work against refugees, rendering themselves as good, white, magnanimous European saviours. The Dead Are Coming provides an imaginative transnational perspective on asylum policies and engages with issues of empathy, hospitality and generosity, even if the Centre for Political Beauty’s ethical stance fails to address the struggle which continues after the moment of refugees’ arrival. Notwithstanding its aesthetic and ethical pitfalls, The Dead Are Coming ultimately makes us realise that we have much work to do in cautiously forming a new political community which “surpass[es] traditional ideas of [being] settled and bounded” (Stierl 2016, 188).

Conclusion Part of the Centre for Political Beauty’s strategy to tackle the issue of statelessness and asylum is clear in their interventions: tearing down the European border fences by means of civic force, ending the immigration deal between Germany and Turkey through parliamentary vote, installing f loating rescue platforms in the Mediterranean Sea and fostering Syrian refugee children. Clearly, these approaches are both symbolic and driven by pragmatic political solutions, aiming for social cohesion and structural political reform. The Centre for Political Beauty offers concrete political guidance for audiences far beyond the theatre, the presumed safe space for make-believe. However,

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the collective’s interventions reproduce practices of othering and the idea of white savourism, and they fail to tackle structural institutional violence with regard to theatre on asylum and migration. The Centre for Political Beauty represents one example among many different artists who have responded to the so-called European refugee crisis since 2015. Its artistic approach is different from the idea of socially engaged practices and co-creation with communities because it seeks to create a theatrical public sphere around issues of asylum and to mobilise society at large to engage in critical political decision-making. Therefore, I would locate the collective within the established tradition of Aktionskunst, as inheritors of Christoph Schlingensief ’s artistic legacy in contemporary German-speaking political theatre. The lens of distributed aesthetics has enabled me to analyse their works by drawing upon multi-referential sources to look beyond the temporary generative event. It is productive in thinking about the ways in which the interventions continue to unfold through public debates, reviews, criticism and social media. The Centre for Political Beauty addresses a multiplicity of audiences, who might not be theatre-goers or street protesters, and might not traditionally engage with political discourses: they deal simultaneously with the dispersed and the situated, the material and immaterial encounter with the work and its highly individuated media distribution. By identifying their interventions as distributed aesthetics and analysing them through this lens, I have shown how they address society at large and tackle political issues in a stimulating but ethically troubling way. Indeed, their interventions are problematic, but I understand “problematic” here as a productive friction rather than a merely pejorative aesthetic judgement. They require us, as audiences, to work through them. Because the interventions produce ethical and artistic ambiguities stemming from colonial legacies and imperial logics: they compel audiences to confront inherent biases and privileges, in a mode I have termed ethical disfluency. This describes the unceasing awareness and needs to build capacity for sitting with ethical and racial discomfort, a critical alertness and drive needed to act otherwise, “where solidarity is rife with impossibility but where, and maybe therefore, an emergent community is cautiously formed” (Stierl 2016, 188). Ultimately, their interventions’ ethical and aesthetic pitfalls, as I have shown, compel us to act, imagine and think otherwise on matters of empathy, generosity and hospitality (Danewid 2017, 1684). With regard to how the artists relate to the state as an opposing player and adhere to the rule of law, as well as to democratic decision-making processes, the Centre for Political Beauty’s approach is “[f ]ar from grandly proclaiming a tabula rasa”, suggesting instead “a chess move in the middle of a minefield” (Lütticken 2018). My investigation of the collective and the wider field of scholarly and artistic work on theatre, asylum and migration addresses academics, cultural practitioners, artists, policymakers and politicians alike to work through their present complicities, biases and privileges when seeking

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to conduct (cultural) work about refugees to “do good” (Marschall 2018). Without disavowing the cultural labour of creating small gestures and social encounters, the examined intervention by the Centre for Political Beauty equips us with a different way of looking at the transnational scale of forced displacement and migration movements. Crucially, they anticipate what political performance might mean on more widely dispersed geographical and institutional levels.

References Amnesty International, “Art for Amnesty” (n.d.), https://www.amnesty.org/en/artfor-amnesty/ (accessed 5 Dec 2016). Bal, Mieke, “Lost in Space, Lost in the Library”, in: Sam Durran and Catherine M. Lord (eds.), Essays in Migratory Aesthetic: Cultural Practices Between Migration and Art-Making, New York: Rodopi (2007), 23–36. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401204675_003 Balme, Christopher (ed.), “Distribuierte Ästhetik: Performance, Medien und Öffentlichkeit”, in: Netzkulturen. kollektiv. kreativ. performativ, Munich: epodium (2010), 41–54. Balme, Christopher, “Surrogate Stages: Theatre, Performance and the Challenge of New Media”, Performance Research 13.2 (2008): 80–91. https://doi. org/10.1080/13528160802639342 Balme, Christopher, The Theatrical Public Sphere, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2014). Bieberstein, Alice von, and Erdem Evren, “From Aggressive Humanism to Improper Mourning: Burying the Victims of Europe’s Border Regime in Berlin”, Social Research 83.2 (2016): 453–479. muse.jhu.edu/article/631169. Bogad, Larry M., Tactical Performance: Serious Play and Social Movements, Abingdon: Routledge (2016). Butler, Judith, Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press (2005). Castañeda, Heide, and Seth M. Holmes, “Representing the ‘European Refugee Crisis’ in Germany and Beyond”, American Ethnologist 43 (2016): 5–6. https://doi. org/10.1111/amet.12259 Centre for Political Beauty, (2016), http://www.politicalbeauty.com/ (accessed 5 Dec 2016). Cox, Emma, “Processional Aesthetics and Irregular Transit”, Theatre Journal 69.4 (2017): 477–496. https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2017.0066 Cox, Emma, and Marilena Zaroulia, “Mare Nostrum, or on Water Matters”, Performance Research 21.2 (2016): 141–149. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2016.11 75724 Danewid, Ida, “White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History”, Third World Quarterly 38.7 (2017): 1674–1689. https://doi.org /10.1080/01436597.2017.1331123 European Council, “Informal Meeting of EU Heads of State or Government on Migration Statement” (23 Sep 2015), www.consilium.europa.eu.en/press/ press-releases/2015/09/23-statement-informal-meeting (accessed 12 Dec 2015). Flynn, Alex, and Jonas Tinius (eds.), Anthropology, Theatre, and Development: The Transformative Potential of Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2015).

62  The Centre for Political Beauty Fraundorf, Scott H., Jennifer Arnold and Valerie J. Langlois, “Disf luency”, Oxford Bibliographies (2018), http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199772810/obo-9780199772810-0189.xml (accessed 11 April 2018). Freshwater, Helen, Theatre and Audience, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2009). Hall, Allan, and John Lichfield, “Germany Opens its Gates: Berlin Says all Syrian Asylum-seekers are Welcome to Remain, as Britain is Urged to Make a Similar Statement”, Independent (24 Aug 2015), https://www.independent.co.uk/news/ world/europe/germany-opens-its-gates-berlin-says-all-syrian-asylum-seekersare-welcome-to-remain-as-britain-is-10470062.html (accessed 5 Aug 2019). Kallius, Minna Annastiina, Daniel Monterescu and Prem Kumar Rajaram, “Immobilizing Mobility: Border Ethnography, Illiberal Democracy, and the Politics of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Hungary”, American Ethnologist 43.1 (2016): 25–37. https:// doi.org/10.1111/amet.12260 Karschnia, Alexander, “Christoph Schlingensief: Failure as Chance”, in: Florian Malzacher (ed.), Not Just a Mirror: Looking for the Political Theatre of Today, Berlin: Alexander Verlag (2015), 161–165. Klepp, Silia, “Europeanisation Spot. An Ethnography of the Frontex Nautilus II Mission”, Journal of Peace and Conflict Research 2.1 (2013): 36–69. Kuryel, Aylin, and Begüm Özden Firat, Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas, and Possibilities, Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi (2011). Lewicki, Aleksandra, “‘The Dead Are Coming’: Acts of Citizenship at Europe’s Borders”, Citizenship Studies 21.3 (2017): 175–290. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025 .2016.1252717 Lichtenfels, Peter, and John Rouse (eds.), Performance, Politics and Activism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2013). Lütticken, Sven, “Actors and Directors: Sven Lütticken on the Congo Tribunal”, Texte zur Kunst (2018), https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/actors-anddirectors/ (accessed 26 Oct 2018). Marschall, Anika, “Europaals Grenze: Flüchtlingspolitik beim Zentrum für Politische Schönheit”, in: Michael Bachmann and Asta Vonderau (eds.), Europa – Spiel ohne Grenzen? Zur künstlerischen und kulturellen Praxis eines politischen Projekts, Bielefeld: Transcript (2020), 211–230. Marschall, Anika, “The State at Play? Notions of State(less)ness in Contemporary Interventionist Performances”, Critical Stages 14, (2016) Open-access article. http://www.critical-stages.org/14/the-state-at-play-notions-of-statelessness-incontemporary-interventionist-performances/ Marschall, Anika, “What can Theatre do about the Refugee Crisis? Enacting Commitment and Navigating Complicity in Performative Interventions”, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 23.2 (2018): 148– 166. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2018.1438180 Mbembe, Achille, “Necropolitics”, Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40. https://doi. org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11 Merrill, Samuel, “The Dead Are Coming: Political Performance Art, Activist Remembrance and Dig(ital) Protest”, in: Ananda Breed and Tim Prentki (eds.), Performance and Civic Engagement, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2018), 159–185. Mouffe, Chantal (ed.), “Art and Democracy: Art as an Agonistic Intervention in Public Space”, in: Art as a Public Issue: How Art and its Institutions Reinvent the Public Dimension, Rotterdam/Amsterdam: NAI Publishers (2008), 6–13.

The Centre for Political Beauty  63 Rai, Shirin M., and Janelle Reinelt, The Grammar of Politics and Performance, London/ New York: Routledge (2014). Ridout, Nicolas, Theatre and Ethics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2009). Serafini, Paula, Performance Action: The Politics of Art Activism, Abingdon: Routledge (2018). Sharifi, Azadeh, Theater für Alle? Partizipation von Postmigranten am Beispiel der Bühnen der Stadt Köln, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang (2011). Shepard, Benjamin, Play, Creativity, and Social Movements: If I Can’t Dance It’s Not My Revolution, New York: Routledge (2011). Sholette, Gregory, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, London: Pluto Press (2010). Simke, Ann-Christine, Berlinische Dramaturgien: Dramaturgical Practices in the German Metropolis, PhD Thesis, Glasgow: University of Glasgow (2016). Stierl, Maurice, “Contestations in Death: The Role of Grief in Migration Struggles”, Citizenship Studies 20.2 (2016): 173–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2015.1 132571 UNHCR, “UNHCR: 6 Steps towards Solving the Refugee Situation in Europe” (2016), http://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/press/2016/3/56d957db9/unhcr-6-stepstowards-solving-refugee-situation-europe.html (accessed 27 Aug 2018). UNHRC, “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2016” (2017), http://www. unhrc.org/5943e8a34.pdf (accessed 7 Sep 2018).

3

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rights repeated – an act of memory December 10th, 1948. The General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The assembly called upon all member countries to publicise the text, causing it to be displayed, disseminated, read and expanded, principally in schools and other educational institutions, without any distinction based on the political status of countries or territories. Preamble. Whereas the recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of humankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people, Whereas it is essential, if people are not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law, Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations, Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in cooperation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms, Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realisation of this pledge,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003110293-4

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Now, therefore, the General Assembly, proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction. Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a kindred spirit. (Ross 2008) This text forms the preamble and first article of the UDHR, enshrined by the UN General Assembly in 1948; I have transcribed these words from the British artist Monica Ross’s performance rights repeated – an act of memory (2005– 2008). In the performance, Ross recites the entire declaration from memory, article by article and word by word. She first performed rights repeated at Hayley Newman’s Woodshed in Beaconsfield, London, in response to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes by the London Metropolitan Police on 22 July 2005. rights repeated was then commissioned by the Live Art Development Agency in London as part of the Performance Studies International (PSi) conference, “Performing Rights” at the Queen Mary University of London in 2006. To mark the sixtieth anniversary of the UDHR, on 7 December 2008 Ross performed in the foyer of the British Library in London. Following this, the performance was developed into a collaborative project. With the curator Jason E. Bowman, Ross transformed rights repeated into the generative recital project, Anniversary. For Anniversary, she collaborated with different artistic, educational and activist organisations: the British Institute of Human Rights, the Solon War Crimes Conference, the Women’s Library, Whitworth Art Gallery, Freeword and the Tricycle Theatre. Unlike her solo recitations in rights repeated, Anniversary is a series of collective recitations by Ross and her co-reciters in more than fifty languages, held at a vast range of venues: community centres, performance festivals, libraries, universities and museums. The performances, which have continued without Ross since her death in 2013, are held on public memorial days that revolve around human rights issues such as World AIDS Day, Martin Luther King Day and International Women’s Day. Anniversary unfolds in time and place across different communities, participants and audiences. Crucial to the project’s heritage and dramaturgy is its dissemination to a wide audience: it is accessible beyond the embodied live event through recordings, documentation, video footage on YouTube and a digital archive held with the British Library.

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Including the preamble and thirty articles, the UDHR is about two thousand words long. Because the declaration is a clearly articulated ethical code, its precise legal language makes it quite difficult to memorise. I attempted to memorise it together with a student group at the University of Glasgow and can attest to the difficulty. In her account of Ross’s performance, the theatre scholar Alexandra Kokoli states that it is surprising and depressing to discover how relevant and essential the UDHR remains to this day, and to admit that although its existence is widely known its articles cannot be recalled at will (let alone ‘under pressure’) by most. (Kokoli 2012, 26) Even though this chapter’s opening translates the performativity and liveness of Ross’s recitation back into a mute, theoretical and weighty text, the spoken words linger. I even go so far as to turn the live performance and the embodied event of listening into a formalised citation. This ties in with the institutional restrictions of many research publications: like the UDHR itself (to the extent that it is read at all), a book like this is silently read by relatively few individuals, rather than being vocalised, embodied or performed for manifold audiences. In most cases, European artists and humanities scholars are privileged and safe enough not to encounter human rights issues in their everyday lives. My opening transcription on the first two pages deliberately refrains from using verbatim methods to directly translate the recital: it does not convey the f luency of the speech, the stress of the syllables, the articulation and projection of the voice, the gestures, the bodily and mimetic movement and the nuances of affect and atmosphere. What it does, instead, is deliberately ask you, the reader, to read – perhaps for the first time – the preamble and the first article of the UDHR, word by word. In the video recording of Ross’s performance on 7 December 2008, the foyer of the British Library is buzzing with murmurs. You can clearly hear the clacking sounds of people walking by and passing up and down the white marble steps of this modern library’s large, echoing entrance hall. The library space looks very functional: it is first of all an archive, a utilitarian space of knowledge accumulation. A few people lean against walls opposite Ross. Spatially, the performer is separated from her audience by video cameras, microphones and photographers recording the performance. Ross is dressed completely in black: black trousers, black jumper and black shoes. Before the actual recital, she seems to acknowledge her own bodily presence in the space: she powerfully breathes in and out, her gaze searches and finds a spot to rest upon, and she takes her time. She holds her chin high and proud, addressing audiences high up on other levels of the building, some 20, 30, 40 metres away from the foyer f loor. With a sharp gesture, she ties her grey hair into a firm ponytail. She starts her solo recitation and invokes a very clear diction that is carefully rehearsed. Ross addresses the audience leaning against the

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walls opposite her and then looks around to those more casually walking by; those whose attention she might eventually capture, whom she also invites to become listeners. To convey Ross’s bodily presence, my transcript needs to be altered. This second transcription (below) draws our attention to what cannot be translated: it reveals that reading the beginning of the UDHR necessarily differs from listening to a recital, performed by differently racialised, gendered and abled bodies, in different languages and accents, on different public occasions and in different locations. The legal philosopher Costas Douzinas has criticised human rights discourse for perpetuating the liberal idea that the human rights subject is an abstract entity, existing outside of social networks and material dependencies. Ross’s performance materialises Douzinas’s argument that “human rights, as a special type of recognition, come into existence and can be exercised only in common with others […], they presuppose the existence of others and of community” (Douzinas 2000, 286–287). [Mumbling noises; clicking sounds from the cameras positioned around the artist; Monica Ross quietly pursing her lips] December the 10th [taking two steps back and slightly rotating her posture towards her left side] 1948. The General Assembly of the United Nations [pauses for a second, inhales]

Figure 3.1 Monica Ross, Anniversary, British Library, London. 2008. Courtesy of Monica Ross Estate. © Alex Delfanne.

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adopted and proclaimed the Universal … [pauses, accentuates] Declaration … [pauses, accentuates] of Human Rights. [looks around, walks four steps directly forward, arms hanging at the side of her body; continues the recital while taking more steps ahead; her head faces the f loor and moves around as if searching for the right way forward]

Human rights as a site of intervention In a recorded interview, Ross explains that her initial intention behind the performance was a personal one: she wanted to force herself to learn the UDHR by heart. She highlights how she wanted the words and the content to “be there whenever she would need it” (Monica Ross Action Group 2015). The act of repeating and reciting it in public was secondary to the more personal, private and invisible labour of learning the entire UDHR by heart. Her performance recital underlines how the declaration’s operating political language is essentially generative; it actually declares that human rights should be taught and promoted by all of us. The recital also suggests how language and ethics can address people through different embodied means. rights repeated does not only enact freedom of expression and make audiences listen to this political language, to the performer’s inf lections of voice, her breaths and hesitations when recalling the words from memory; rights repeated reiterates human rights. Ross’s performance links the seemingly abstract text of the declaration to oral traditions and paradoxically performs both, revealing on the one hand the text’s contingency, and on the other the gravity of its enshrinement in law. Annabelle Mooney explains that while the UDHR from a legal perspective is “not exactly law”, it nonetheless “has a law-like status and authority and affects not just international relations and politics but also domestic human rights systems” (Mooney 2014, 482). For the purposes of this chapter, I treat the UDHR as a legal text as well as a performative text. Listening to the recital of the declaration opens my body literally to this legal text and to the bodily presence of another. At the same time, this act of listening opens my body to the possibility of reclaiming this particular language, forming an embodied relation to its legal form and turning it into workable material for everyday existence. Ross’s performance makes the legal matter and the discourse of human rights more tangible, consequently exposing them as a possible site for intervention. In this chapter, I take the productive tension of Ross’s performance as a starting point to think through the ways our shared bodily vulnerability relates to the standards of so-called “universal” law. The performance makes it clear that human rights are not mere “articles to be read or viewed”, but

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rather that they “inhere in the body of the person” (Purbrick 2011, 167). Essentially, human rights need to be claimed and performatively enacted precisely to bring rights-bearing subjects into being. What consequently comes to the fore are the limits of human rights as a “carefully kept document” (Purbrick 2011, 167): we need to stay vigilant regarding the disjunction between the documentation of rights and their performance. In her account of Anniversary, Kokoli argues that a substantial part of its political and ethical significance lies in the inevitable pauses in each recitation as the co-recitors struggle to recall the article that they have chosen to memorise and recite. Indeed, being able to remember the Declaration, especially under pressure, is essential to its function. These caesurae find their counterpart in the patient, discreet and sympathetic waiting of the co-recitors and the artist herself, who are assigned the double role of performer and audience. (Kokoli 2012, 24) Kokoli emphasises the pauses, the ruptures and the waiting between the recited words; a waiting which compels the audience members to attend to one another, rather than being inactive. To me, the key principle for the performance is listening rather than waiting, because when we listen, we become aware of our inherited rights and realise that we are responsible for their reiteration and enactment. Anniversary makes the audience perform self-ref lective listening which connects us physically to others as well as to our own ontological uniqueness, which I will explain later in this chapter with reference to Adriana Cavarero. Whereas Kokoli ref lects upon the intense but often invisible labour of remembering in her analysis of Ross’s performance, this chapter uses the artistic project as a starting point to envision ways in which artists reimagine legal matter: How can legal texts such as the UDHR become part of an artistic interrogation and subsequent intervention into the politico-legal sphere – in particular with regard to the often overwhelming administrative complexity of law making? The embodied listening to human rights in Ross’s public recital posits a performative possibility of sensible and sensual encounters with legal matter, which otherwise tends to appear abstract and alienating. Here, the act of listening, the attentiveness towards both the structure of legal matter and to the voice as the material passage of air and vibration, can disclose a sense of bodily vulnerability in our relationship with human rights and suggest how, together, we might understand and enact them differently across many different public sites (Purbrick 2010, 2).

Performing rights The Monica Ross Action Group (including the performance artists Anne Tallentire, Susan Hiller and Yve Lomax) has collaborated with Ross’s family

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and friends to preserve and continue her posthumous legacy, which comprises a 40-year-long body of socially engaged, feminist performance art. Since Ross’s death in 2013, the group has continued her projects, as with their work on Anniversary, which involves facilitating public recitations of the declaration and organising performances and exhibitions. The group maintains the website monicaross.org, which includes an extensive archive comprising performance documentation, drawings, video and text. This archive is not only intended for artists and scholars; it encourages a wider public to make use of Ross’s material as a model or template to promote human rights. Performance encounters such as Ross’s have the potential to inspire and motivate audiences, encouraging them to fight for a continuous negotiation of rights and justice. Performance, as a self-ref lective, embodied and inherently social art practice, is particularly adept at promoting and engaging in this kind of dissemination and negotiation. In dialogue with the academic organisers and paper presentations at the PSi conference “Performing Rights”, the Live Art Development Agency in London curated an artistic programme that would ref lect upon creative strategies artists were using to effect social, cultural and political change; to illustrate new models of relationships between art and activism; and to consider the role and responsibilities of artists, curators, and performance itself, in the understanding, enactment and sustenance of human rights. (Live Art Development Agency 2006) Strikingly, the conference’s subtitle asked “What can performance do for human rights, and human rights for performance?”, indicating that both realms are of service to each other, while also maintaining the idea of them being two distinct spheres. Keynotes were given by policymakers and politicians, rather than theatre scholars and artists: by the Secretary-General of Amnesty International, Irene Kahn, and the former National Secretary of Public Security in Brazil, Luiz Eduardo Soares. The conference incorporated an ambitious programme of events, with contributions on the political efficacy of creative resistance from activists and artists such as John Jordan, The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, the vacuum cleaner and The Laundry Project. The Library of Performing Rights based in London is one of the public outcomes of this conference; it includes conference documentation and an archive of performance-related interventions. It also performs a generative role, functioning as a multimedia educational resource for innovative creative practices that might continue to facilitate human rights work. Through both Anniversary and the conference, we can see how the UDHR and its plural performativities may be understood and used as both legal matter and as generative ethical framework by those driven to fight for social justice in their artworks, classrooms or everyday encounters. I use the plural term “performativities” to stress that the question of who is a rights-bearing

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subject necessarily reaches beyond legal discourse, raising issues around politicised practices of exclusion. Claiming rights is necessary to generate political agency for both self and other, and it can be accomplished via different bodily means. In other words, the practice of claiming one’s rights is ultimately performative and needs to be considered as the very basis of rights discourse and the ontology of political beings as such. Rights are not merely some kind of appendage; rather, they fundamentally create political beings. Therefore, I argue that a critical human rights scholarship should draw upon performance as a lens through which to engage with human rights.

Human rights and listening Ross and her collaborators’ recitation makes apparent that performance art can activate the intertwining of two different aspects of human rights: the conceptual and the sensual. As Amy Tobin explains, Anniversary weaves together “multiple terms of embodiment” that range “[f ]rom the subject of the declaration, the human; to the citizen, represented in the performance through the multiple ethnicities and nationalities represented in the languages of Ross’s co-reciters; and finally the body as technology and its capability to remember” (Tobin 2015, 288). Anniversary introduces different layers to this chapter: the intricate relation between human rights and listening; the role of the listener as a political agent; and the role of the artist and her participants and collaborators as legal experts. This mixture of research fields requires navigation between ontological thinking, identity politics and performance studies. Ultimately, these intersecting perspectives’ nodal point is the question of solidarity: How might an attuning to listening help us to generate and maintain solidarity with bodies that speak out against injustice and inequality? As the theatre scholar Konstantinos Thomaidis stresses, a turn towards the vocal embodiment of rights does not “guarantee that this body is not still a generic and generalised body, a body in the abstract” (Thomaidis 2017, 46). He insists that “voicing bodies incorporate complex gendered histories and are constructed both by their physiologies and by the ideologies in which they partake”, often problematically perpetuating “a binary logic between male/female, text/sound, language/rhythm, or music/body” (Thomaidis 2017, 47). I will return to problematic binary logics when listening to refugees and asylum seekers in the next chapter. Questions of aesthetics are secondary for a performance such as Ross’s, in which the law, the UDHR and freedom of expression are part of the dramaturgical structure. When humanities scholars have discussed these legal aspects of human rights – in relation to literature, language, image and screen – they have tended to apply a textual and philosophical analysis, rather than taking a sensual, embodied and racially attuned approach (Peters 2008). Writing about the voice often conf lates it with political agency. To counter this tendency, the conceptual stress should be laid upon the ear and the

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materiality of listening, the conditions which determine how we recognise, label and valorise something as audible or as voice in the first place. With reference to Cavarero’s work on vocal ontology, human rights need to be imagined on the basis of the fundamental interdependency of human beings. Listening does not occur in neutral spaces. It can (re)produce power relations, but it also has the potential to engage us in different acts of worldmaking. Discussions of sound, voice and listening need to reach across different registers, racialised historiographies and white dominated epistemologies and methods. I therefore draw upon works outside the field of theatre: from critical legal studies, political philosophy and media theorists. This alignment places listening in relation to legal practices in the courtroom, in relation to the ontology of human rights subjects and political agency, and in relation to the performing body in the arts. In exposing this alignment, I demonstrate that listening, as both conceptual and embodied practice of world-making, interpenetrates the political, legal and artistic realms. Ultimately, I argue that progressive political agency is rooted in the action of listening “across differences” (Dreher 2009).

Listening in law, philosophy and performance As audiences in the theatre and in everyday life, we watch, but we also listen: to voices, rhythms, music, electronic and acoustic sound, silence, shouts, whispers, coughs, breaths and rustling. Listening is a means of attuning oneself to the world and to others. It is an entangled, dynamic and ephemeral process in manifold social situations. Physically, listening functions through air set in motion and the vibration of particles, objects, organs and bodies. While the affective experience of listening is too complex to be quantified through musical notation, amplitude or frequency alone, there is great scholarly and artistic interest in assessing the aesthetic qualities of voices and sounds. The recent turn towards cultural traditions of listening, oral histories and explorations of the aesthetics of sound and voice has already been much discussed, particularly in the emerging field of sound studies (Couldry 2010; Sterne 2012; Thomaidis 2017). Driven by new technologies and a focus on materiality in the arts and humanities, scholars have published on the relationship between aurality and attention and have investigated various modes of listening through phenomenology and affect theory (Ihde 2007; LaBelle 2006; Nancy 2007). Don Ihde’s work, first published in 1976, is a major inf luence on the school of thought which holds that sound can never be a tangible object and remains impossible to grasp. However, there is a notable lack of work considering the whiteness of this turn towards sound’s ontology: exploring listening as a social and political process which might challenge identities, privilege and help to dismantle the harmful societal binaries – the sense of “us and them” – which persist in relation to racialised, marginalised and othered speakers and audiences. The white dominated epistemologies,

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methods and analytic tools through which we hear are deeply implicated in the racialisation and gendering of sound and listening practices and are not to be untangled from imperial histories, colonial logics (Eidsheim 2019; Khesthi 2015; Stoever 2016; Thompson 2017; Yamomo 2018). The human right to freedom of speech, the right to express oneself without fear of discrimination, can be seen as the founding principle for engaging with political conf lict and racial inequality. The media scholars Tanja Dreher, Penny O’Donnell and Justine Lloyd have discussed how to place questions of listening in relation to political conf lict and inequality in a critical framework that complicates racialised and gendered speaking/listening binaries. They argue that an attention to cultural histories of listening and sound cultures has encouraged us to look for ways to get past the binaries of sound and vision to examine listening as a collective embodied, emotional and discursive practice, rather than one marked by the absence of its other: the authority of the visual text. (Dreher, O’Donnell and Lloyd 2009, 427) Kate Lacey has introduced the idea of the listening public, which emphasises the importance of active engagement, interrelation and resonance with public speakers: Listening is at the heart of what it means to be in the world, to be active, to be political. Thinking in this way about listening as a political action in and of itself is strangely counterintuitive. Listening tends to be taken for granted, a natural mode of reception that is more passive than active, but listening is, I would argue, a critical category that ought to be right at the heart of any consideration of public life. (Lacey 2013, 163) I agree with Lacey’s argument that the freedom of listening is as important as the freedom of speech and is central to manifold critical artistic practices which aim to give a voice to those silenced within hegemonic frameworks. The issues of equal access to the public sphere and the permissibility of agonistic modes of engagement need to be discussed in relation to the political role of listeners in our multicultural societies: listeners understood as responsible for public exchanges, performances and plurality, rather than being seen as a quiet or even mute audience of public discourse (Lacey 2013, 9). Taking seriously the public space and social reality of Ross’s performance, we could say that rights repeated and Anniversary also exercise freedom of listening, compelling audiences to listen collectively and attune to legal matter by a means other than expert cognition. While it is not necessary to develop an encompassing theory of listening, the politics of listening demonstrate the necessity for different ways of

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performing human rights that are attuned to racial, gendered, sexual and abled difference and make way for different ways of world-making across intersectional difference. To develop the latter, we need to rethink which responsibilities should attach to the roles of speakers and listeners in the context of migratory belonging. Different ways of world-making need to recognise listening as a methodological approach that acknowledges the value of voice as a counterweight to ideologically unjust political structures.

Soundfulness of law Listening is an essential part of law: there are laws regulating voice and listening, freedom of expression, audio copyright and even noise pollution. But listening is also an embodied part of legal practice: consider the history of legal oratory, the etymology of “courtroom hearing” and the ritualised swearing of oaths. The voice is that which breathes life into law: what materialises it, gives it reality, shape, force, and effect. Voice here is the medium or technique of law’s acoustic expression: its juris-diction. And of course different jurisdictions give voice to law differently in different places at different times: from the police car’s siren to the church bells of Christianity to the call to prayer in Islam to the songlines of Aboriginal Australia. Despite claims that law today is an overwhelmingly textual and visual enterprise, sound remains a key feature of law’s conduct, transmission and embodiment. (Parker 2015, 4) The Australian legal scholar James E.K. Parker seeks to bridge the disciplines of sound studies and law in his research by conceptualising the lawful human being as a listening being: one who experiences sound haptically with the whole body through vibration, even in cases of severe hearing loss. The elucidation of this haptic exposure reveals the vulnerability of a listening human being to sound: it reminds us that sound can cause physical harm and can even be fatal. Parker illustrates how “[c]ourts and legislatures claim to govern both the kinds of vocalizations we are permitted to make – what we can say or sing, where and when – and who gets to listen” (Parker 2015, 3). Various policies negotiate our relationship to sound and how we listen: with what kind of devices, in which amplitudes and frequencies. Law is deeply implicated in our experiences of sound. But so is our relation to legal institutions and our understanding of justice. As the political philosopher Jacques Rancière notes, political statements and literary locutions produce effects in reality. They define models of speech or action but also regimes of sensible intensity. They draft maps of the visible, trajectories between the visible and

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the sayable, relationships between modes of being, modes of saying, and modes of doing and making. (Rancière 2004, 35) Hence, I avow for a new sensitivity to questions of sound and the importance of new listening practices in legal theory and practice. The courtroom, for example, is a space and an institution that works primarily with rational speech rather than sound, song or music. However, the legal practices within courtroom hearings rely on specific acoustic performances, which Parker calls “the soundscape of justice” (Parker 2011a, 962). Think of the swearing of oaths, the barrister’s closing, the reading of the judgement and the judge’s gavel knocking. Critical legal studies need to shift and attune to questions of sound, the vocal and performance practices. Jurisprudence is therefore not about the realization of some foundational, all-encompassing justice, but the responsible navigation of a whole range of competing, and possibly even incommensurable demands. To do jurisprudence is to recognize that we are responsible for law for many different reasons and in many different ways. And moreover, that it is precisely when the demands on us are at their least compatible and their most complex that this responsibility is at its greatest. (Parker 2015, 7) This leads me to consider how the performing of human rights cannot solely deal with doctrinal change in legal matter but must also engage with the embodiment of legal practice and jurisdiction. A performing of human rights thus encompasses a performative orientation towards law and legal institutions; a performative attuning to questions of social justice which enables performers and audiences alike to hold institutional stakeholders to account. As I have noted in relation to Anniversary, performing legal texts like the UDHR necessitates a critical engagement with the invisible knowledge of human rights discourse and law, accessed only by legal and political experts. Connecting a critical legal perspective with performance gives rise to understand the performing of human rights as a sounding, vocal and embodied practice – inside and outside of courtrooms. It suggests that to hold powerful legal texts and political institutions to account we require bodily, sounding knowledge of the law, but also that we must maintain a certain distance from it. The theatre scholar Alan Read reminds us that the relationship between performance art and law is grounded on the presumption that law has to be seen to be done (Read 2015, 9). I would add that law also has to be heard to be done. Read argues that it is technically not legal to practice law in private, since law is constituted through a conscious act of “showing doing” – one of the defining features of performance art. Read argues that testimonial or

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tribunal performances function as theatre not because it is about legal matters; rather, tribunal performances work theatrically because they are about human animals in a very precise form of representational crisis which connects this experience, the one in the theatre, with others elsewhere we have had or wish to imagine, where power and its contestation are at stake. (Read 2015, 11) Invigorating the axiom “to give a voice to the voiceless” (Hare, cited in Heddon 2008, 128), theatre stages often seek to provide listening ears to stories and voices which are otherwise excluded from public discourse, and which can help us to reimagine human rights. In this context, theatre is seen as politically useful because it can provide a platform, a setting and a stage for oppressed and marginalised communities to make their points of view heard by a wider public audience. It is important, however, to challenge the metaphor of the “voiceless” and the problematic idea of speaking for rather than with others in verbatim and documentary theatre. To acknowledge the sounding embodiment of jurisdiction makes us focus on the pragmatic function of jurisdiction for society: what it means to perform jurisdictionally. In courtrooms, people perform. The way people perform in courtrooms show tells of how our different societies communicate and organise themselves around bodies of law – those texts which enshrine the rules by which we live together. My engagement with the textual tissue of human rights moves beyond the theory of legal matter and is informed by embodied experiences that signal our shared bodily vulnerability before the law. To a certain extent, this vulnerability is engendered by the standards and rules of legal institutions themselves: how the interpretation of law is solely undertaken by knowledgeable experts and how law is composed in complex bureaucratic language which restricts common access to it. These standards and rules operate in perilous regimes of visibility and audibility; they instantiate listening as a political act. Politicised acts of listening can be empowering, but regimes of audibility can also cause harm: people who do not speak the language demanded or required by law, for example, cannot access their rights, and consequently face social and legal exclusion. Linking the legal sphere (a sphere of control, discipline and norms) with that of performance art (a sphere of imagination, creativity and agonism) is therefore productive in interrogating the politics of listening.

Listening as political action It is obvious, then, that law is not only made up of written rules but encompasses performative action. Law is “lived both in sound and by virtue of it” (Parker 2011b). This critical expansion of how we understand law necessitates a new emphasis upon the politics of lived embodied experience inherent in

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texts, signs and stories. As indicated earlier, legal practice and jurisprudence have become a rich source of material for artists to explore social justice and human interdependency. While the previous section focused on distinct legal perspectives on the role of sound and listening in performing the law, it also raised the question of who the subject of law and of human rights is. In legal response, the disembodied, objective “general voice of law” (Duong 2005, 30) aims to order social structures by making use of rationality and asserting authority. However, what seems to stand in contrast to such responses is the introduction of embodied, lived experiences across intersections of race, gender, sexuality, abilities and class. Therefore, in the following, I turn to the notion of the uniqueness of a person’s corporeal voice, a uniqueness which might resist preconceived legal frames, as proposed by Adriana Cavarero. With caution about Cavarero’s colourblindness, I consider how this idea might relate to a standardised, enshrined universality in the form of human rights. The emancipatory ideal of “giving a voice to the voiceless” is a sound studies problem in the context of migratory belonging and human rights. When we look at the representational politics and dominant narratives of contemporary Europe, re-examining our notions of voice emerges as a timely and pressing project. This project will help us to analyse the frameworks which shape international jurisdiction and thus determine our ability to assert our rights before the law and governmental authorities. As opposed to “hearing”, I understand “listening” to designate a deliberate act in relation to others which produces the agency of speech and thus constitutes a speaking subject in the first place. Alongside reading and looking, cultural practices of listening have gained renewed significance because they raise issues about our understanding of civic engagement, political participation and the mediation of experiences. Political agency is often characterised by means of finding a voice. Finding a voice further implies the finding of a public that will listen. Political agency can be granted to the listener once we attune to the intricate relation between voice, speech and listener rather than (counter-) privileging throat over ear. In the legal context of asylum, it is the listener who exercises power and enforces governmental authority. Building on the legal perceptions of courtroom performances mapped earlier, in the following I first employ a politico-philosophical discourse to think through the ways in which subjects are interrelated both as voicer and auditor, as storyteller and listener. I then outline how political norms of cultural belonging are constructed and/or subverted through the means of voice and ears. I thus demonstrate that listening is a powerful act embedded in social processes of recognition: an agentive exercise that conditions who can tell their stories, in what ways and with what politico-legal consequences.

Adriana Cavarero’s vocal ontology Adriana Cavarero has shown that the trajectory of Western thought from Plato to post-structuralism has perpetuated a bias against the vocal, which is seen as

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inferior to a logocentric understanding of language (Cavarero 2005, 53–61). Countering this, she argues for the unique qualities of voice, which create resonant vibration, moments of intersubjective communication and relatedness between bodies – going beyond linguistic modes of self-presentation. Sound creates and opens spaces for bodily engagement through “the very spreading out of its resonance, its expansion and its reverberation” (Nancy 2007, 13). For Cavarero, “the sphere of the vocal implies the ontological plane and anchors it to the existence of singular beings who invoke one another continuously” (Cavarero 2005, 173). In this, albeit colourblind, ontological account, the voice is the means of the other through which subjects come into being. Through voice, we communicate ourselves viscerally beyond any logocentric linguistic exchange and beyond the semiotic generality of language. Cavarero’s ontological lens sheds new light on the political: to consider what politics means to consider how we live together as embodied beings, and how we are exposed to each other through our throat and ears. Cavarero’s work is heavily inf luenced by that of Hannah Arendt, which stresses the actuality of displaced people. Arendt argues that we are not born equal, asserting instead that equality is a premise for political action; and she critiques the nation-state for limiting the possibilities for political change, because those deprived of the right to have rights are not seen as agents who can participate in the mechanisms that might increase equality (Arendt 1986, 296–297). Arendt articulates the central paradox of the universal notion of human rights: the need for them to be negotiated through national politics and based upon citizenship and nationality. While she argues for a renewed political space independent of the state, Cavarero envisions a political space that is less concerned with space in terms of borders, governments and jurisprudence. For her, instead, political space refers to a multiplicity of human interactions through words, speech and action. In her work Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, she refers to Arendt’s reformulation of the question of who is the subject of human rights, or to be precise, “what is Man?”, as “who are you?” (Cavarero 2014, 13). Arendt’s reformulation enables Cavarero to critique Western politics’ failure to respond to the uniqueness of persons and their interrelated life stories, because this politics insists on claims to universality. She argues that the language of human rights meets its limits in our essential human practices of storytelling: We could define it as the confrontation between two discursive registers, which manifest opposite characteristics. One, that of philosophy, has the form of a definite knowledge which regards the universality of Man. The other, that of narration, has the form of biographical knowledge which regards the unrepeatable identity of someone. The questions which sustain the two discursive styles are equally diverse. The first asks “what is Man?” The second asks instead of someone “who he or she is.” (Cavarero 2014, 13)

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Cavarero arrives at the question of “who” by insisting on the essential human desire to have one’s story told. We are inherently dependent upon one another to narrate our life stories, as Arendt has suggested: “every individual life can eventually be told as a story with a beginning and end [which] is the prepolitical and prehistorical condition of history” (Arendt 1958, 184). In response, Cavarero explains that essentially, every person inhabits what she calls “narratability” (Cavarero 2014, 26). Storytelling functions as a verbal response to the question of “who”, and it can become a political action based on human relationality, moving beyond any notion of political agency based on individuality. The feminist scholar Rebecca Adami concludes from her reading of Cavarero that “we see how political agency is realized in relations; hence, we are dependent on others for political agency” (Adami 2014, 169). Our desire for storytelling can become particularly strong and urgent when we have been denied public recognition and being kept outside of the political community. Exposure and access to a wider public, for example within the legal realm, is taxing when considering racialised, gendered, sexualised, classed and ableist social structures. Following this, Cavarero allows us to reconsider the notion of political agency and raises the question of how human rights discourse becomes increasingly legal – with troubling political implications. How can we navigate the human rights discourse, one which is increasingly dominated by agents and gatekeepers of the system: human rights experts, scholars, professionals and lawyers who have established a discipline-bound expertise which reduces human rights to a legal framework? Because this notion of a systemic human rights agency is potentially harmful, because it excludes and undermines who and what falls outside of the discourse, Adami rightfully asks: “[h] ow can we then reread the concept of human rights in the UDHR, beyond the legal discourse surrounding human rights?” How can we see “that there is more to the concept of human rights than […] a legal term and […] talk of rights [or in my work: perform rights] in other ways than in terms of violations?” (Adami 2014, 165). Political agency in Cavarero’s seminal work, For More Than One Voice, is concerned with rethinking political space beyond legal borders and standards of societal belonging, via our plurality of voices and their vulnerable interrelation. In Cavarero’s words: the vocalic helps not only to think in even more radical and corporeal terms the ontology of uniqueness but it helps above all to conceive of politics in terms of a contextual relation, entrusted to speech, which does not appeal to territory or identity myths of community. (Cavarero 2005, 209) As a result, Adami suggests that we rethink human rights politics, with Cavarero, “as not bound by national legislative measures, but as concerning

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political action in-between human beings” (Adami 2014, 163). Political action, then, is to make a difference by means of listening-in on my and your unique voice, regardless of social and migrant belonging.

Navigating the terms of being heard Drawing on Cavarero’s political philosophy of human rights in relation to voice and the notion of uniqueness, it is necessary to consider the more pragmatic field of media studies, which examines our actual creative capacity to enact rights beyond imposed borders of social belonging. As an essential part of this enacting, listening becomes a necessary condition for the creation of political spaces based on difference and plurality. It enables us to contest the “static notions of what counts as legal and political space”, following the observation that the “United Nations is built upon conventions of representations (rights of ‘women’, ‘children’, ‘indigenous people’, and ‘migrants’)” (Adami 2014, 164). While Cavarero does not engage with the realities of governmental policy, administration and polity, my understanding of the political is situated in the contemporary social reality of refugee-ness and the ongoing struggle to obtain justice in the context of migrant belonging. I situate Cavarero’s notion of the political as the vocal in opposition to the presumed social weightlessness of listening when it comes to the exercising of power and rights. Therefore, her politicisation of the ontological significance of the vocal lies within what I term an interpellative performance context – both within the political arena of public discourse (human rights, asylum law and jurisdiction) as well as in private life (family, appearance and intimacy). By introducing Cavarero’s notion of the vocal into this context of interpellation, the agency of language – and the linguistic vulnerability of subjects – is highlighted. Language is powerful, and it can hurt us. “There is the violence of language itself ”, and for asylum seekers, the “law is full of examples in which people are judged in a language or an idiom they do not understand” (Douzinas 2005, 173). But as Cavarero insists, the language, style or manifestation of one’s life story need not be in opposition to what she calls the “narratable self ” (Cavarero 2014, 34). The most important narrators of one’s life stories are indeed our loved ones. Based on this notion of the vocal, how one can performatively intervene in acts of interpellation to enact different political togetherness? Artistic interventions can expose, interrupt or reimagine instituted acts of interpellation by different means. This can include questioning an official policy or disrupting a person who is speaking from a position of power: making them listen differently, and thereby positioning oneself in an embodied rights-based relation to them. Listening is an inherent part of interpellation. Lisa Stevenson has argued that there are modes of listening, just like modes of speech, that can fix someone, as individual, in a particular subject position. That is, there is a certain mode of listening reserved for listening to children, to criminals, to

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drunks, to kings. What can the child say that is not childish, the criminal say that is not itself criminal, the drunk say that is not drunken, the king say that is not kingly? (Stevenson 2014, 161) What can the refugee say that is not about being a refugee? How can we imagine and practice listening as an interrelated act which does not fix an identity in advance (as the Althusserian perspective argues), but instead carefully navigates the crucial terms upon which one is heard? Stevenson proposes that we dissociate the idea of interpellation, considering it not as a tool of ideological subjectification (as it is in the paradigmatic Althusserian example, the policeman hailing an individual who subsequently responds and thus turns herself into a subject of law). Instead, Stevenson asks whether the act of interpellation can be one of love: [w]hat happens when the call really isn’t a matter of fixing the other in his or her place but making room for that other within language? What happens when intelligibility as such is no longer the highest stake in a discussion of interpellation? (Stevenson 2014, 164) In the context of migrant belonging, listening can indeed put the storyteller at risk ( Jeffers 2012, 50), but Ross’s work also asks us to consider how we might practice interpellation by listening differently, in an affective and more elusive context of shared presence, of being-with, of resonating-with. How can we practice a listening which calls into question the distribution of narrative resources (Couldry 2010, 9), and the racial, gendered, classed and ableist limitations by which voices can be heard and recognised in institutional politics?

Listening across difference The Australia-based media scholar Tanja Dreher has argued that most policy research on cultural diversity emphasises speaking and uses the notion of voice when critiquing stereotypical and racist representations. While I am not looking into mainstream, community or diaspora media, it is still valuable to follow her proposed shift in media studies from speaking onto questions of listening. By drawing on post-colonial feminisms, Dreher explores the value of a shift beyond the politics of voice to consider “listening across difference” in her field of media studies (Dreher 2009). Research on modes of listening can generate productive new understandings of multiculturalism and serve to undo entrenched hierarchies of voice. The challenge for racialised, marginalised, vulnerable people and refugees is not simply to speak up but to be heard on their own terms; to address difficult issues or complex conf licts while at the same time attracting a wider

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public audience. While it is vital in any case to aim for the empowerment of marginalised voices, of voices marked as other, Dreher explains that her interest in listening has a specific, strategic basis. Her aim is to reach beyond the common idea of a politics of “speaking up”. In contrast to listening as a producer of imperial knowledge, as well as against a liberal politics of politeness, she explores listening as a “potentially difficult” process, a “conf lictual” one which aims “at justice which sustains difference” (Dreher 2009, 448). Dreher shows that the aim of polite conversation often entails romanticising the other and homogenising difference and identity. Countering this, listening becomes politicised if it enables “shared action despite deep inequalities and unavoidable conf lict” (Dreher 2009, 450). Susan Bickford has termed “political listening” as a “particular kind of listening” that might undo “oppression [which] happens partly through not hearing certain kinds of expressions from certain kinds of people” (Bickford 1996, 149). The key characteristics of political listening she mentions are openness and receptiveness, which create vulnerability in the listener: “the riskiness of listening comes partly from the possibility that what we hear will require change from us” (Bickford 1996, 149). In the context of inequalities and conflict, listening can provide the basis of an agonistic forum for shared responsibility and engagement. The politics of this listening can be found in the intersubjective possibilities for a relational learning through dissonance and the ceding of certainty, rather than in single, individual forms of vocal expression. Dreher concludes that “a politics of listening does not simply allow an other to speak, but rather foregrounds interaction, exchange and interdependence” (Dreher 2009, 450). Based on her research about minority Muslim women, racialised men and migrant justice activists, the political scientist Leah Bassel similarly calls for a politics of listening: A politics of listening that has political equality at its core requires listening completely, not selectively when speaking to the state, and to hear demands, not to dehumanise as “antipolitical” or seek to “excuse”, when action is against the state. This requires listening also for the past, to recognise rather than erase the historical roots of unequal social relations that condition the visible, present moment of conf lict. This listening recasts the story being told and who is able to tell it, and shifts roles of speaking and listening within new relations of interdependence and recognition. This is micropolitics, embedded in social and political processes that need to be understood within their cultural and historical contexts but also connect across and transcend them. (Bassel 2017, 89) Bassel argues that in highly charged political conf lict the challenge is not to be heard on one’s own terms, but to “uncover the norms of audibility” (Bassel 2017, 17), to be listened to by the state at the intersection of class, race, gender and legal status. Consequently, the politics of listening affirmed

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by Dreher, Bickford and Bassel demands a shift in responsibility in order to transform norms of audibility: from marginalized voices and on to the conventions, institutions and privileges which shape who and what can be heard in the media. […] The right to be understood would confer upon all a crucial obligation – to actively seek to comprehend the Other. (Dreher 2009, 447) In addition to the “original” 30, or first- and second-generation articles of 1984 enshrined UDHR, since the 1970s there have been more civil and social articles added in other international documents. Drawing upon this idea of third-generation human rights, “a right to be understood” has been proposed too (Husband 1996, 441). This right, arguably, stems from the hegemony of Western communicative power – evident in media production, publishing and broadcasting – which generates a reciprocal obligation to listen and understand. The right to be understood necessarily entails attention towards the other, in the form of listening that nurtures ambiguity and diversity of knowledge: listening as an essential skill for intercultural interaction and a performative attitude to sustain creative openness. However, there is always the risk that understanding will become a “morally weighted product of listening”, removing the “active agency of the understood” (Husband 2009, 443). Provocatively, we could question what makes academics, politicians and journalists the “‘experts’ on the lives of others” (Husband 2009, 443) and conclude that their inaction and refusal to actively change the world themselves is itself political. How can we then inhabit the role of listeners as politically active agents and nevertheless call for a “listening across difference” to envision political equality in a multicultural, multilingual, migratory Europe? Listening as a political action can make it possible to elicit solidarity and to attune oneself to the world – but it can also be a potentially harmful exercise of political power. Performance studies research on testimony in the context of forced migration provides an important route into questions of listening both as a practice for social justice and as an institutional obligation. In the next chapter, my focus will therefore be on significant frameworks for refugee-ness and the aporia of refugee testimony. Ultimately, this enables me to discuss the social significance of artistic expertise, which can lend listening ears to stories and potentially effect long-term politico-legal change. Such expertise is therefore endowed with the political agency to effectively intervene in, rather than merely gesture towards, the systematic violence of jurisdiction and human rights.

Conclusion The politics of listening is crucial to our relations with one another – both as a mode of reception and an intricate part of a vocal ontology. In Cavarero’s

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proposed vocal ontology, listening becomes a powerful political action and the vocal defines the very humanity and interdependency of human beings. This interdependency makes us advocate for a reimagination of human rights – placing emphasis on our shared bodily vulnerability and openness towards one another, rather than on the agency of isolated individuals. Such advocacy for human rights is clearly championed by contemporary artistic interventions I have identified in this chapter. Performances such as Monica Ross’s ascribe to the artist, her participants and collaborators a new role as legal experts who can co-create new forms of embodied knowledge to perform human rights beyond the artistic realm, being equipped and always ready to contest unethical and pernicious legal procedures. Politics enters these modes of listening exactly when we are forced to negotiate positions of power and precarity, when the law listens in on our bodies and vulnerability, and when we are faced with questions of belonging. It has become obvious in these analyses that we need to stay vigilant about modes of reception, the ways in which we listen to one another, because listening can be both a harmful tool of institutional violence and a powerful tool of solidarity. Crucially, listening as a conscious performative practice, a connective tissue of our interdependency, is therefore rooted in the discourse of belonging and human rights. A turn to listening is necessary for theatre and performance scholars and storytellers more broadly: listening lies at the heart of what it means to be human, to recognise others, to negotiate conf lict and to enact solidarity. It introduces the element of radical materiality and the symbolic value of jurisdiction into the discourse of law and performing human rights, which is often dominated by semantics and the textual. Returning to the beginning of this chapter, Ross’s performance series Anniversary – an act of memory provides an opportunity to unpack what performativity means in an artistic rather than a legal context and points to the different layers of performativity in dialogue with human rights. In her work, racialised, abled, gendered and stateless bodies and multilingual voices claim the UDHR as their own. The performance here facilitates a sensible and sensual encounter with legal matter, usually experienced as alienating and abstract. Ross’s seminal ongoing performance series allows us to understand how human rights inhere in our bodies, rather than being a purely textual structure. Precisely because our bodies always seem to fail or to be in excess, their radical materiality interferes with the representational regime of language and thus law; human rights are exposed as possible sites of intervention, and as something that can always be performed otherwise. Stories lie at the heart both of theatre and what it means to belong. When political stakes are high and people face the perilous consequences of f leeing a country, crossing borders and seeking asylum, the sharing of stories and the telling of one’s own story become existential exercises both legally and in everyday life. As demonstrated in the previous chapters, stories of migration, as well as the imposed performing of refugee-ness, should be acknowledged within the theatrical canon. However, the theatre as a social institution must

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stay vigilant regarding the pitfalls and limits that come with its own representational regimes: for example, the commodification of emotions and vulnerabilities for predominantly white, privileged, middle-class audiences and the reproducing of power relations through listening in and looking on. This chapter makes it evident that listening is not readily understood as a tool to easily reconcile conf lict. Instead, listening should foreground a commitment to responsibility: that is, a shift towards demanding responsibility from those in power, who condition the terms on which one is heard and with what effects. The question of listening bears an important relation to the question of justice. As can be seen from the discussions of critical legal scholarship and Ross’s artistic work, modes of listening can inf luence institutional decision-making outcomes in law. This chapter is therefore part of my appeal, to jurists as well as politicians, cultural practitioners, scholars and artists, to carefully use the legal means at our disposal: “to pay attention, to listen better, to prick up your [politicised] ears” (Parker 2011a). As Parker notes, sound is an inalienable part of our legal worlds and a condition of the administration of justice. Ultimately, it is not just the liberal celebration of speech that shapes our political and legal system and functions as an operating force of racial institutional violence across Europe; it is also our cultural practices of listening.

References Adami, Rebecca, “Human Rights for More Than One Voice: Rethinking Political Space Beyond the Global/Local Divide”, Ethics & Global Politics 7.4 (2014): 163–180. https://doi.org/10.3402/egp.v7.24454 Arendt Hannah, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1958). Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcout Brace Jovanovich (1986). Bassel, Leah, The Politics of Listening: Possibilities and Challenges for Democratic Life, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2017). Bickford, Susan, The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict and Citizenship, Ithaca, NY; Cornell University Press (1996). Cavarero, Adriana, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (2005). Cavarero, Adriana, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, Florence: Routledge (2014). Couldry, Nick, Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism, Los Angeles, CA/London: Sage (2010). Douzinas, Costas, “Violence, Justice, Deconstruction”, German Law Journal 6.1 (2005): 171–178. https://doi.org/10.1017/S2071832200013535 Douzinas, Costas, The End of Human Rights: Critical Legal Thought at the Turn of the Century, Oxford: Hart (2000). Dreher, Tanja, “Listening Across Difference: Media and Multiculturalism Beyond the Politics of Voice”, Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 23.4 (2009): 445–458. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304310903015712

86  Human rights and the politics of listening Dreher, Tanja, Penny O’Donnell, and Justine Lloyd, “Listening, Pathbuilding and Continuations: A Research Agenda for the Analysis of Listening”, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 23.4 (2009): 423–439. https://doi. org/10.1080/10304310903056252 Duong, Wendy Nicole, “Law is Law and Art is Art and Shall the Two Ever Meet? Law and Literature: The Comparative Creative Processes”, Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 15.1 (2005). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1651976 Eidsheim, Nina Sun, The Race of Sound. Listening, Timbre & Vocality in African American Music, Durham, NC: Duke University Press (2019). Heddon, Deirdre, Autobiography and Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2008). Husband, Charles, “Between Listening and Understanding”, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 23.4 (2009): 441–443. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10304310903026602 Husband, Charles, “The Right to Be Understood: Conceiving the Multi-Ethnic Public Sphere”, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science 9 (1996): 205–215. Ihde, Don, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, Albany: State University of New York Press (2007). Jeffers, Alison, Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities, New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2012). Kheshti, Roshanak, Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music, New York: NYU Press (2015). Kokoli, Alexandra, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through in Anniversary – An Act of Memory by monica ross and Co-Recitors (2008–)”, Performance Research 17.5 (2012): 24–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2012.728436 LaBelle, Brandon, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, New York: Continuum International (2006). Lacey, Kate, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age, Oxford: Polity Press (2013). Live Art Development Agency, “PSi#12 Performing Rights: London, 2006” (2006), http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/projects/psi12-performing-rights-london-2006 (accessed 14 August 2017). Monica Ross Action Group, “Act of Memory – An Introduction”, 1 May 2015 https://youtu.be/qlwkQ Jd4tgM (accessed 14 August 2017). Mooney, Annabelle, “Corporeal Mentality: The Book of Blood, Universal Human Rights, and the Body”, Journal of Human Rights 13.4 (2014): 480–497. https://doi. org/10.1080/14754835.2014.886954 Nancy, Jean-Luc, Listening, New York: Fordham University Press (2007). Parker, James E.K., “The Soundscape of Justice”, Griffith Law Review 20.4 (2011a): 962–993. Parker, James E.K., “Towards an Acoustic Jurisprudence: Law and the Long Range Acoustic Device”, Law, Culture and the Humanities (2015): 1–17. https://doi. org/10.1177/1743872115615502 Parker, James E.K., “Towards an Acoustic Jurisprudence”, Critical Legal Thinking (2011b), http://criticallegalthinking.com/2011/09/27/clc-2011-towards-an-acousticjurisprudence/ (accessed 23 July 2018). Peters, Julie Stone, “Legal Performance Good and Bad”, Law, Culture and the Humanities 4.2 (2008): 179–200. https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872108091473

Human rights and the politics of listening  87 Purbrick, Louise, “Museums and the Embodiment of Human Rights”, Museum & Society 9.3 (2011): 166–189. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1685334 Purbrick, Louise, “Museums and the Exercise of Human Rights”, Transitional Justice Institute Research Paper 10–17 (2010). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1685334 Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, London: Continuum (2004). Read, Alan, Theatre & Law, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2015). Ross, Monica, Rights Repeated – An Act of Memory, British Library, London (7 December 2008), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOVTO32KmeY (accessed 14 August 2017). Sterne, Jonathan, The Sound Studies Reader, New York: Routledge (2012). Stevenson, Lisa, Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic, Berkeley: University of California Press (2014). Stoever, Jennifer Lynn, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening, New York: NYU Press (2016). Thomaidis, Konstantinos, Theatre & Voice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2017). Thompson, Marie, “Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies”, Parallax 23.3 (2017), 266–282. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1339967 Tobin, Amy, “Backpages: Monica Ross”, Contemporary Theatre Review 25.2 (2015): 273–291. https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2015.1021142 Yamomo, meLê, Theatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific, 1869–1946. Sounding Modernities, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2018).

4

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

And their judges spoke with one dialect, but the condemned spoke with many voices. And the prisons were full of many voices, but never the dialect of the judges And the judges said: “No-one is above the Law.” (Leonard 1995, 17)

While Monica Ross’s rights repeated compels audiences to listen collectively and attune to legal matter by a means other than expert cognition, Turnerprize-winning sound artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s performative interventions signal a profound shift in the political agency artists might be granted when intervening in the realm of legal matter and asylum law. Hamdan’s artworks engage with listening, testimony and stories shared by refugees and asylum seekers regarding their legal asylum procedure, exposing the limits and ethics of performative representation. Due to his artistic expertise in listening, Hamdan served as an expert witness at a tribunal, dealing not with art-related issues but with an urgent matter of human rights. In 2013, his work Conflicted Phonemes was submitted as evidence at a deportation hearing before the UK Asylum and Immigration tribunal, where the artist himself testified against an asylum seeker’s rejection. In 2016, Hamdan investigated a torture case for Amnesty International. Hamdan’s interventions enable a critical attentiveness to how the state employs listening as a political technology, and to how we – as aures populi, public ears – listen-in on human rights and listen to asylum seekers. Hamdan is a Beirut-based sound artist who investigates law, human rights and legal procedures. His artworks include audio-visual installations, performance lectures, videos, photography, graphic illustrations, Islamic sermons, cassette tape compositions and publications. His works have also been exhibited and performed across the world from the Liverpool Biennial (2016) to the Shanghai Biennial (2014), as well as being part of the Arts Council England and Museum of Modern Art collections.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003110293-5

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Hamdan’s artworks arguably produce a new sensibility for the act of listening and the political power of the listening subject rather than seeking to “give a voice to the voiceless”, as theatre is often said to do (Marschall 2017). Hamdan critically attends to how the state employs listening as a political technology and to how “we” listen to and listen-in on asylum seekers, torture survivors and marginalised people. As comes to the fore in conversation with Hamdan and his artworks, listening can indeed put the storyteller at risk in the context of migrant belonging and may necessitate a moment of refusal, an exercising of one’s right to silence, to not tell one’s story. Hamdan has also undertaken sound and speech analyses for human rights investigations as part of his work for the Forensic Architecture agency at Goldsmiths College in London. The agency works closely with human rights lawyers to uncover facts about state violence which confound the stories narrated by powerful authorities such as the police, the military, state representatives and corporations. On their website, Forensic Architecture explains that they operate as an NGO which “undertakes advanced research on behalf of international prosecutors, human rights organisations, as well as political and environmental justice groups” (Forensic Architecture n.d.[b]). Alongside founding member Eyal Weizman, the team includes experts from various disciplines: architects, artists, designers, programmers, activists, lawyers, writers and scientists. Together they apply arts-based methods to legal evidence in high-profile human rights investigations to analyse and expose political, ecological and social violence (Forensic Architecture 2014). Forensic Architecture explores the potential of forensics as a political, cultural, theoretical and aesthetic concept. In their book Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics, Weizman and Thomas Keenan (2012) consider the implications of a forensic turn for practical, but also conceptual, political and artistic engagements with mass political violence. Forensics therefore also has an affective impact: it elicits strong emotive responses, dealing as it does with individuals’ transformative dynamics of memory and grief; fostering identification and empathy or even hostility towards the other; cultivating history and memory-making in the aftermath of political violence; and conceptualising the politics and agency of the dead (Marschall and Simke 2018). But, as Zuzanna Dziuban argues, forensics here does not only function “in relation to past but also to unfolding [and future] realities of violence” (Dziuban 2017, 12). Building on the previous discussions of the notion of voice, the performing of refugee-ness and the role of listening in the courtroom, this chapter introduces Hamdan’s artworks: Conflicted Phonemes (2012), The Freedom of Speech Itself (2012), Land Mines/Language Gulf (2013/2017), Rubber Coated Steel (2016) and Saydnaya (2016). Hamdan’s interventions make us rethink the political stakes of listening and raise the question of what agency and power mean when they are attached to the ear rather than the voice. Hamdan’s works ask us to consider how we might practice interpellation by listening differently, in an affective and more elusive context of shared presence, of being-with,

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of resonating-with. Ultimately, the chapter prompts the question: How can we practice a listening which calls into question the distribution of narrative resources, and the limitations by which voices can be heard and recognised in institutional politics?

Asylum testimony in a culture of disbelief In the context of a wider “culture of disbelief ”, forced migrants seeking asylum are often categorised as bogus if they cannot provide credible testimony (Gibson 2013, 2). However, at the same time, asylum seekers are often rendered speechless and frequently silenced within the public sphere. Their narratives, testimonies and life-stories face an aporia of bearing witness. Hamdan’s artistic interventions challenge this aporia by attesting to the political impact of listening and the norms of audibility, particularly when speaking to the state. The technocratic partition of the sayable and the audible, enforced by state actors in the refugee determination processes across Europe, threatens to reduce or efface the complexity of migratory narratives and of the vocal biographies which testify upon migrant experiences. A substantial part of Hamdan’s work focuses on political listening through forensic voice analysis in asylum seekers’ legal cases. This forensic procedure linguistically analyses an asylum seeker’s accent to determine whether they are telling the truth about their national origin. Forensic listening provides the technocratic means to legally reject them on the grounds of untruthfulness. This form of listening has an agency which “expands the bandwidth of audible speech”– that is, legally liable speech – but it also contains the potential for actively “altering the realities of its subjects” (Stickler 2016, 20). In the case of forensic listening in legal asylum procedures, the performance context constitutes a subject as voice and cultural belonging are probed through an act of listening, rather than speaking. Therefore, in the context of migratory belonging, listening is not a tool that might simply and unproblematically reconcile conf lict or overcome inequality. Nevertheless, as Kate Lacey reminds us, listening can also be performed as “an ethical commitment, a willingness to take another seriously, a concrete means of turning towards” (Lacey 2013, 9). Listening is an act of attention that acknowledges how our stories are entangled with the (yet untold) stories of others through our ears. While on the one hand, Hamdan’s works make visible how political inequalities are enacted and sustained through the powerful positions of certain listeners, on the other hand, his interventions open up questions about a listening that acknowledges our bodily entanglement and thus has the potential to invert and trouble those positions. Artistic interventions such as Hamdan’s create the possibility of telling stories in ways that both counter harmful binaries and enhance attentiveness to how the powerful listen to the vulnerable. Political listening practices can be submissive and damaging, but they can also foster new forms of cultural belonging and enable new political representations to emerge. Acts of listening can oscillate between submission

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and subversion; they can break with convention or stay within it. Art practices can enable people to enact equality by demanding to be recognised as speaking subjects, where their capacity for voice has not previously been acknowledged. Nevertheless, the mode of reception is crucial in determining the terms upon which one is heard because the interpretation may produce fragile understandings and uncertain narrative outcomes.

Telling an authentic story Hamdan places new emphasis on norms of audibility rather than culturally dominant narratives of visibility (Hamdan 2016, 1). His artistic interventions bring forth a form of political agency and, I have argued, “an ethical responsiveness that is based on the act of listening” (Marschall 2017, 69). Rather than negotiating a critique of moralised dualisms between authentic/bogus and belonging/alienation (a critique which would focus on the speaking subject: Who is telling the truth? Who tells the most authentic story?), Hamdan’s interventions produce a political responsibility that resides within the position of the listener herself. Hamdan’s proposed politics of listening impels us to reconsider our naturalised practices of exclusion. Shifting perspective from the prevalent notion of our society as a speaking and self-representational one, Hamdan seeks to understand the political impact of listening. He asks: Who is allowed to speak before the law, whose voices will be heard and in what ways? How can we account for practices that authenticate accents and voices and categorically fix identities and origins? Building on this, I ask: What might be an aesthetic of resistance to these unethical – if not racist – yet legal disapprovals of “inauthentic” and “wrong” voices? Caroline Wake argues that in verbatim theatre or performance art which solicits testimonial stories and searches for truth, “alienation and authenticity are often working in tandem rather than opposition, meaning that verbatim theatre performs not so much authenticity as an ‘aesthetic of authenticity’” (Wake 2014, 84). That is, the interplay between aural, visual and textual references within a performance frame can offer an aesthetic “which appears to lend a greater authenticity to [its] shows, but that appearance is in itself a performance” (Luckhurst 2008, 2015). It could be responded that while people do have voices already and need not be given them, verbatim theatre offers listening ears. However, the way audiences listen is not necessarily ethical and can easily be co-opted. With a listening turn already underway in performance studies, it is important to ask how such an “aesthetic of authenticity” might reproduce imbalanced structures of communication – structures that reify otherness and exclude particular groups from effective voice in the first place. The graveness and uncertainty of the contemporary political landscape in Europe and beyond, which is partly driven by the complex consequences of migration movements, requires us to confront biased forms of listening. As I have already argued, it is particularly important to challenge established

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state-related demands to perform authenticity and to give “a plausible account of oneself by means of voice today” (Couldry 2010, 131) when it comes to refugee performance and asylum appeals. While Hamdan’s work does not include verbatim plays for the stage, my understanding of them nevertheless builds on theatre discourses about the role of testimony and freedom of speech. Therein, the complex aesthetic relationship between alienation/belonging and authenticity/artificiality reveals once more the paradox of theatre: it is both a space of fiction, in which we can imagine alternative realities and rehearse different ways of worldmaking, and a space anchored in socio-political reality, where we demand real, effective impact and a platform for minorities or vulnerable people to be heard. Even if post-structuralist criticism easily targets and troubles the epistemology of truth, authenticity and reality (Martin 2010, 1), contemporary Western society remains preoccupied with truth as a defining issue for performance (Lavender 2016) – be it performance in the theatre, politics or law. By addressing the shortcomings and failures of processes that fix refugees’ socio-political identities through listening to their voices, Hamdan’s interventions confound the Western-oriented idea that the voice might contain some definite truth about one’s cultural belonging. In my reading of this work, I therefore cast the voice equally as a metaphor to critique dominant regimes of gendered and/or racialised representation and as embodied, sonic material of our ontological uniqueness. Caroline Wake has argued that specific forms of verbatim theatre can shift our practices of listening and thereby assist, damage or disable the formation of publics. In reference to Gayatri Spivak, Wake insists that in this way theatre can engage new modes of listening and cultural belonging: “[r]ather than thinking about whether the subaltern can speak, listening encourages us to think about whether the mainstream subject can listen” (Wake 2014, 95–96). Informed by Wake, I have discussed with Hamdan about how the arts are part of the problematic cultural production of truth in the context of migrant belonging. The fallible and discriminatory process of voice authentication, which is exposed in Hamdan’s interventions, lets us shift the analytical focus from a theatrical mode of seeing – in terms of staging, casting and performer bodies, costume and setting – towards a theatrical mode of listening in terms of voice, audibility, affect and political agency. The research journey undertaken in the previous chapter has moved from the concept of listening in legal philosophy and the practice of listening in courtrooms, via the understanding of legal subjectivity as rooted in the act of storytelling, to understand listening as an intricate action of human interdependence and human rights politics. In the context of the perilous European asylum system, persisting colonial legacies and the legal culture around refugee testimony, the political stakes of listening are high. What weaves these different research strands together is the search for a truth that is entangled, embodied and sensual, and which goes beyond the realm of mere legal discourse. It is therefore necessary to contextualise Hamdan’s forensic aesthetics and his human rights work.

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Figure 4.1 Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Conflicted Phonemes, 2012. Exhibition view Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, 2019. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Schenkung Baloise Group, Mathis Völzke. © Lawrence Abu Hamdan.

Migrating voices In his artworks Conflicted Phonemes and The Freedom of Speech Itself, Hamdan explains that as an undocumented asylum seeker in the UK, you can either give your body in evidence (if, for example, there are torture marks which relate to your testimony), or you can have your biographical claims validated by giving your voice in evidence. Usually, such voice evidence interviews last no longer than fifteen minutes. They are recorded and sent to Scandinavian companies which produce a verdict on the origin of the asylum seeker – without ever meeting them in person. These companies use software programmes as well as experts who listen to recordings. Thus, their analysis operates without acknowledging that interviews are embodied encounters between two unique persons and voices; they neglect any form of embodied language such as gestural cues, mimetic expression or the body language of the asylum seeker. This physical and emotional distance is compounded by the fact that the interviewer often does not speak the same language as the interviewee, or lacks certain linguistic and cultural knowledge: they are unlikely to realise, for example, the extent to which the interviewee has adapted their typical speaking style to facilitate easier communication (Hamdan 2014, 220). We all speak differently if we are with someone we are close to, rather than a stranger who barely speaks the same language. Our forms

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of speech change depending upon the context, whether that is a workplace, an intimate setting or an immigration office. But such nuances are not taken into account in the accent tests. In Hamdan’s audio documentary The Freedom of Speech Itself, he shares different stories: a case worker tells of an Afghan man from the Haraza ethnic group whose asylum claim was denied because of the way he pronounced the letter “t”, which convinced analysts that he was Pakistani instead of Afghan. Another story revolves around the pronunciation of the word “tomato”, which was used at checkpoints during the Lebanese civil war to detect whether an enemy (in this case, a Palestinian) wanted to pass. A third story is told by a Sierra Leonean who has been mistakenly identified as Nigerian and is about to be deported “back to his country”; he wonders aloud where he will go once he arrives at the airport in Lagos. These stories, paired with the contributions of field experts and voice analysts, once again raise vexing questions about equating geographical origin with the language(s) one speaks: cultural registers underscore this analytic process, which negates actual, lived diversity within and across national borders. Such stories of migration expose the colonial residues of and dangers posed by legal, monolingual perspectives and emphasise the complexity of vocal biographies. Towards the end of the audio documentary, Hamdan includes a telling interview with a person whose native tongue is virtually impossible to determine – giving way to manifold possibilities of linguistic belonging. The seemingly simple question “Where are you from?” opens up “cosmopolitical worlds of constant migration” (Apter 2016, 106): – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

So… So, where are you from? What do you mean? I’m from Hackney. Yeah Hackney… But you’re Danish, aren’t you? No, I’m Palestinian. Well, I grew up in Denmark. You’re Palestinian… From where in Palestine? I’m not from Palestine. So where are you from? Well, we’re Palestinians from a refugee camp in Lebanon, Ain al-Hilweh. Okay, so you were born in Lebanon? No, I was born in Dubai. Okay… how come you have an American accent? What do you mean? Well… You have this American twang to your English. It’s because, you know, because of Eddie Murphy and Stallone and all these guys… So you’re from Hollywood? No, no, I’m from Hackney.

This conversation highlights once again how fiction and cultural biases intertwine when we presume something to be an authentic native tongue and

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neglect the complex traces of one’s past which are left on the language one speaks. It highlights how an accent is not only a cultural marker which may be stigmatised, but even more so how an accent creates a new bureaucratic liability for asylum seekers, which has been politicised as a primary colonial threshold to the very social realm itself. One is not free to choose on what terms one is listened to. Intervening in these high political stakes, The Freedom of Speech Itself includes a legal petition which audiences are invited to sign – not as an artistic object, but as a legal document in progress. The petition was drafted by Hamdan in collaboration with a lawyer. It aims to stop forensic accent tests being imposed on asylum seekers and also calls for an amendment to the right of silence by expanding the caution “anything you do say may be given in evidence” to “any way you say something may also be given in evidence”. The project Conflicted Phonemes (2012) brought together linguists, activists, cultural workers, the graphic designer Janna Ullrich and a group of twelve Somali refugees in Utrecht. Together with this group, Hamdan re-examined voice maps of asylum seekers created by the Dutch immigration authorities. Such maps visualise accents by drawing on recorded interviews to verify the speaker’s geographic descent. Words are analysed by linguists to (in theory) determine the person’s accent and “exact” place of origin. The group discussed ways to counter this controversial use of language analysis to determine asylum seekers’ origins because all twelve of the Somali refugees were subjected to such a test and their asylum requests were all rejected due to fallible outcomes. With Hamdan as its artistic leader, the group showcased visual maps demonstrating how the plethora of dialects and induced mass migration in Somalia make it impossible to classify identities by accent or distinct pronunciation alone. With Ullrich’s aesthetic visualisations, the non-geographic maps expose and disseminate the realities of this technology and related asylum policies. The maps explore the hybrid nature of accent and complicate its relation to one’s place of birth. They counter the maps produced by the immigration offices by including the social conditions and cultural exchanges of people whose lives have been constantly itinerant. Consequently, the project sheds light on the volatile history and geography of Somalia over the last 40 years as a state that has experienced continual migration movements and crises. As Forensic Architecture states: “[i]ts complexity is a testimony to the irreducibility of the voice to a passport, namely its inapplicability to fix people in space”. I would add that what underscores this thinking is the legacy of violence against colonised peoples and the systematic imposition of colonial languages and continuing illusory norms of “correct” usage (Forensic Architecture n.d.[a]). Conflicted Phonemes has been exhibited in various galleries and refugee organisations around Europe. The project was commissioned by the Casco Office for Art Theory and Design in Utrecht and first exhibited there in 2012. It was subsequently exhibited at Tate Modern in London (2013) and at the Lisa Cooley Gallery in New York (2013). The exhibited objects comprise

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Figure 4.2 Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Conflicted Phonemes, detail, 2012. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London. © Lawrence Abu Hamdan.

a large vinyl wall print (a systematic voice analysis overview) and five accompanying A4 vinyl wall prints (individual voice maps) in black and white, as well as five stacks of identical A4 handouts printed on embossed paper housed on a shelf beneath the vinyl wall prints. The large voice map is a colourful labyrinth comprised of dotted lines, neatly computerised columns, rows of geometrical figures, mathematical coding and phonetic translations of syllables which can only be read by expert eyes. For people who did not take part in the discussion or participate in the research group, the maps at first glance seem enigmatic, cryptic and scientific. But at the same time, they reveal a meticulous aesthetic form, with geometric shapes, balance and precision. Only with the help of experts and the people involved in creating them can the maps be de-encrypted, described and explained, and thereby actually tell their stories of migration: stories about asylum seekers being subjected to fallible accent tests. As Emily Apter explains, the black-and-white [A4] maps show how the voice is a dynamic variable, shifting constantly in relation to who is speaking or being addressed, while the large blue diagram presents voice as a living archive, compositing accents accumulated over time and in different places. (Apter 2016, 107)

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C

CONFLICTED PHONEMES VOICE MAPPING

VOICE : ABDI

1

12

[SOM]

2

11

3

[YMM]

[SOM] [SOM-BEN] [YMM]

[ENG] [SOM-BEN]

[ENG] [DUT]

4 [SOM] [ARA]

10

[YMM]

[DUT]

[SOM-BEN] [YMM]

[ENG]

9

[AMH] [SOM] [SOM-BEN] [YMM]

8

– ABDI

IN 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

SOMALIA: MOTHER FATHER ENGLISH TEACHER SOMALI & ARABIC TEACHER FELLOW PUPIL FROM STH SOMALIA FELLOW PUPIL FROM COASTAL SOMALIA FELLOW PUPIL FROM NTH SOMALIA SOMALI LIVING IN ETHIOPIA

5

– PERSON SPEAKS WITH

IN THE NETHERLANDS: 9 DUTCH (ARRIVAL IN NL) 10 DUTCH (CURRENTLY) REFUGEES/ASYLUM SEEKERS: 11 AFGHANS IRANIANS KENYANS KURDS RUSSIANS UGANDANS 12 SOMALI

[SOM] [YMM]

6

7

[SOM]

STANDARD SOMALI

[SOM–BEN]

BENAADIR (SOMALIA)

[YMM]

MAAY (SOMALIA)

[ARA]

ARABIC

[ENG]

ENGLISH

[DUT]

DUTCH

[AMH]

AMHARIC (ETHIOPIA)

Part C (Voice Mapping) of CONFLICTED PHONEMES Lawrence Abu Hamdan & Janna Ullrich Utrecht, 2012 Commissioned by Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory in collaboration with Stichting LOS

Figure 4.3 Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Conflicted Phonemes, detail, 2012. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London. © Lawrence Abu Hamdan.

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These maps counter the stories told by immigration authorities; they record and contest miscarriages of justice. The immigration authorities had mistakenly attributed different citizenships to the group of Somali asylum seekers, resulting in wrongful deportation and imprisonment based on the fallible notion that identity or descent can be scientifically determined through voice authentication. Crucially, the maps did not only serve aesthetic and symbolic purposes: they were also submitted as evidence at a deportation hearing before the UK Asylum tribunal, in which Hamdan testified as an expert witness on behalf of the asylum seekers he had worked with and listened to.

Listening as a fallible politico-legal exercise of Othering Building upon one another, Conflicted Phonemes and The Freedom of Speech Itself expose the powerful position of certain listeners and the truths that are presumed to be discovered through the object quality of voice. The interventions work across media and artistic genres, combining audio techniques of radio programmes, podcasts and television documentaries. Both audio–visual installations seek an educational rather than affective or emotional effect. Hamdan’s works are open-ended and have an ongoing impact on legal discourse, both as scientific research and artistic practice (Kreuger 2015, 63). Hamdan champions a multilingual and cross-cultural listening which functions as a key instrument in challenging political efforts to de-legitimise and other voices when stakes are high. Apter persuasively argues that political concerns [about translation and multilingualism] are relevant to critical work in art and language insofar as critics are constantly performing as judges of the narrative authenticity of voice, or adjudicating, within university systems and arts institutions, the limits of freedom of speech and the violation of human rights. (Apter 2016, 112) It is evident from these works that we still face challenges when it comes to contesting power, especially regarding institutional violence against refugees, asylum seekers and stateless people. We must continue to challenge the ideological notion that authenticity can be heard and judged as physical evidence in testimony. It is ontological uniqueness and our vocal relatedness, rather than individual “authenticity”, that is inherent in our voices; authenticity is not an effect of the single voice itself but of the listener’s prior extra-legal knowledge, or rather their beliefs about territorial descent and political identity. While authenticity is paradoxically required to be performed by asylum seekers before the law, such authentically performed testimony never seems to be enough. The voice becomes a legal commodity, the very material evidence through which one’s story is proven to be right or wrong, part of the asylum matrices laid out by the law.

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Hamdan’s interventions operate on visual, audio and other sensory levels. They critically attune us to how listening is used as a powerful political exercise, deeply embedded in naturalised practices of othering and exclusion. However, they also open up different modes of deep or intense listening, an ethical listening across differences and a political listening to stories of migration. With this in mind, I appeal for a differently nuanced understanding of how voices themselves migrate when our bodies are forced to move place, setting or encounter.

In conversation The following interview was held online on 16th July 2020 and transcribed and edited by the author in agreement with the artist. After our initial introductions, Hamdan mentioned “I sometimes play the role of a private ear. That is the best way to describe it. But I am not playing that role now. I might play it at some point in the interview, but I am not playing it now”. With that playful framing, Hamdan ridicules the idea that there is something like a distinct, purely aesthetic playing field outside the real world. Being asked as an artist figure and responding with the label of an investigator seems to be an elegant and quick strategy to establish himself as always already operating with one foot (or respectively: one ear) inside and one outside those binary frames, which audiences are used to reference. To me, your works have not only high political stakes, they deal with political conf licts in and of place, identity and voice. How did you become politicised in your life or in your journey as artist? What was that moment of politicisation like for you? Did it have to do with language or a personal encounter, a book perhaps? LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN (LAH): I think there are several layers to that question, and I think I continuously become re-politicised through life and work. To start, I am of mixed heritage, which already puts you in a unique position from a young age, particularly when it comes to introducing yourself in school and in the classroom. In addition, I am also from a religious minority, the Druze, which has always raised many different questions, which as a kid, you can sometimes hide and evade playfully. I am thinking for example about the different stories and narratives we are being told at home by our families, the rituals and everyday things we do, things other people do not do, and when you might be asked about these differences, you sometimes cannot or shouldn’t talk about it. ANIKA MARSCHALL (AM):

My dad very much embodied code switching for me. Every person he speaks to, he switches between different accents and speaking styles, which was a formative experience to me growing up. Watching someone like him becoming multiple characters is a very interesting way of understanding from an early age that your sense of individuality and subjectivity is predicated only on who

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you are in dialogue with in that present moment, rather than something to be too precious about or something to centre in a political discussion. My next moment of politicisation was getting involved with the DIY music scene in the north of England, in Leeds. To be part of a community of people who are guided not by any specific aesthetic choices, but purely political ones in the sense that it is a scene and community, which practices radical openness to all kinds of types of music and sound making. The one principle this community has is that none of the music-making is for profit. They avoid and reject the hierarchies and commodification strategies of the music industry. Instead, all profits go to the musicians after a gig and are distributed equally. To me, this presents a unique and deeply political organisation of listening and music. Spending years within those networks across Europe, touring with bands and arranging gigs for people in the UK politicised me: it expanded my sonic horizon and it taught me lessons about community organisation. The third moment I think about is my encounter with Eyal Weizman, when I was at the ripe age of twenty-three. This encounter was very impressionable, as I was reading his book Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation and Weizman’s way of thinking about Palestine. In Hollow Land (2007), Weizman analyses the historical build-up of architecture, including the building of the Israeli West Bank barrier, tunnels and sewage systems, military toolkits, movement protocols and airspace, through which Israel sustains her occupation. He argues that these architectures function as weapons rather than mere sites, and are embedded in a political discourse of surveillance and population control, as they are in a post-structuralist, leftist logic of liberalisation and environmentalism.]

[AM:

The oppression, dispossession and colonisation of Palestinians force all young Arabs of my generation to learn politics. Palestine is a kind of patient zero through which our understanding of the world is completely shaped. Even if we are not ourselves Palestinians, seeing the way it is mediated, represented and how little their treatment concerns the world, fundamentally shape how you approach people who look like yourself or share your ethnicity, and those suffering under structures of dispossession. I think you have to invariably arm yourself against the way you are spoken about and cast in the West from a very early age, if you are Arab. All my politics necessarily have some basis in the teachings of Palestinians and their resistance to racism and colonisation. From the very beginning of making art, my intention was always to deal with politics. Not to make artwork about politics but rather to use art to make political claims. AM:

We are speaking during the summer of 2020. My more analytical thinking around performing human rights, which frames this conversation,

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has started around 2014, 2015. Since then, I have witnessed from my white, European perspective how migrant movements started dominating public discourse and news. I am thinking for example about language of fear and/or celebration in light of the ad hoc and temporary opening of inner European border on the one hand, and on the other, the fear and/ or celebration in light of the perilous “safeguarding” of outer European borders against racialised others. To name but a few additional changes in the global political landscape: we saw the pro-fascists Narendra Modi becoming Prime Minister of India in 2014, the Brexit campaigns and vote in UK and Donald Trump becoming the President of the USA in 2016, and Jair Bolsonaro winning the presidential elections in Brazil 2018. How would you characterise these political shifts, and how have they perhaps affected your work? LAH: The shifts you are describing have pinpointed the importance to produce and contest narratives, and why that is a political necessity. We can no longer be afraid to seize all our means to produce grand narratives, which are equipped to take on those produced by fascists and right-wing politicians. Your examples speak of a shift in understanding and producing truth in the sense that fascists and right-wing politicians and populists have co-opted post-structuralist logics: the idea that that truth is, of course, plural, has become weaponised. Fighting this means avoiding a return to any singular truth. However, I believe we need to find new tools which equip us to counter these shifts and narratives in productive ways and to create a new kind of truth-based consensus. I would call for positing truth within our own ideological framework. One such tool for me is sound. What has been so fascinating to me about looking at the history of sound in the courtroom is that you are constantly seeing a tension between, on the one hand, the production of evidence, which is very much about neatly fragmenting, categorising and isolating certain elements; “this thing goes here and this bag goes there”. On the other hand, and this is the whole problem, sound just does not behave like that. Therefore, the ways in which we have conceived to solicit evidence, whether that be in an interview room or through physical objects, means that whenever we deal with sound, we are already dealing with a kind of contestation to the production of evidence. Sound is relational, it brings people into its orbit in ways which defy vision boundaries. Often, it is the case that testimony leaks through walls and that is defined as not being in the same space. However, acoustically, the listeners hearing the leaked sounds are very much so in the same space as the ones omitting it. Therefore, sound demands a reorientation and even a dissolving of presumed spatial and sensorial boundaries, especially when those boundaries are connected to the drawing and expanding of contemporary border spaces. It is important to note that these shifts in border spaces are of course dating back longer than 2015. I do not define these last five years as distinct,

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because in 2011, I was already in court testifying against accent analysis policies. If you think once more about the post 9/11 era and 2001, for example, you see that the kernels of this same logic trace back longer than Modi, Bolsonaro and Trump: borders were already turning into biometric frontiers and borders within the voice were already being erected. Let’s get back to that necessity to contest narratives and think about it more. Coming from theatre and performance studies, I am always interested in hearing good stories and different forms of telling a good story. What make a good storyteller for you? How do you tell a good story? LAH: The Biography of the Object by Sergei Tret’iakov from 1929 comes first to mind. Tret’iakov writes from a Soviet perspective against American literature and the imperialist American narrative at that time. In a nutshell, I would say, his point is that the focus on the individual persists as the centre of Western bourgeois literature, which is why their narratives are actually quite limited, as they focus on the individual protagonist and the space of one life alone. However, what he suggests is that if we tell the story through the relation to an object, we can explore all the different hands, bodies and people who touched the object. Thus, what opens up is a much wider narrative, explored through a plethora of the object’s places the people engaging with the object with all their distinct biographies. Georges Perec’s novel Life: A User’s Manual from 1978 works in a similar fashion. A good story might start with an object or an architecture, because they produce networks. I think networks are incredible stories. Another fascinating example is historical fiction by Hilary Mantel, particularly her 2017 Reith Lectures on BBC Radio Four, where she explains her methods, how to describe different networks effectively, in order to produce compelling narratives and stories. AM:

To understand what happened within a room of two people that had historical significance, but had no other witness, you have to understand everything that brought them to that very moment and to that very room. A good story then demands intense research: tracing all the other people they spoke to before, all the forces and environment around them and all the things and places they have encountered before. Then you can tell what happened in the room, without anyone else bearing witness to it. That I find very cool. Finally, I think lists make good stories, too. I love lists. I love Svetlana Alexievich’s list making, for example. AM:

In another conversation, I remember you mentioning Harold Pinter’s play Mountain Valley. Mountain Language takes place in a prison complex, where two women seek to visit their husband and son but are abused and sexually violated at the gates. They are not allowed to speak, as their mother tongue, the mountain language, has been banned. While the younger women seeks to defy the structural and sexual violence done on

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her, the older women gives in, and eventually, in the final scene of the short play, a change of law has happened which allows her to speak the mountain language again, but she remains silent. Pinter references here the banning of the Kurdish language in Turkey during the 1980s, and in regard to the Irish conf lict, during the Broadcasting Ban between 1988 and 1994, he started becoming politically engaged regarding the freedom of speech in UK, and in his playwriting dealing with political oppression, systemic state violence and institutions, rather than the cruel behaviour individual characters alone [Grimes 2005, 92]. Given Pinter’s intricate work with and on language and the themes of violence and silence, I would like to hear more about what role gender plays in your narratives, your work. When I think about, e.g., the different spaces of conf lict you deal with, they mostly take place within patriarchal cultures, they mostly present male figures, victims and survivors, male storytellers. LAH: My reference to Pinter was not about a gendered reading, and instead, what I take from that play is very specific, but also quite fundamental to my work. The play precisely articulates that the giving of speech is just as violent as taking it away, and of course that is not necessarily a gendered experience at first glance. Dramaturgically, as reader or audience, you are continuously voting for the language ban to be lifted, so you finally hear the oppressed speak. However, when the ban finally is lifted, suddenly you realise that as audience, you have been complicit with this kind of structural, and perhaps violent, demand to always give a voice. It is a very short play and this shift happens within one scene, which leaves audiences on their own, prompting them to think about the different representational demands and what forms of representation can be made by whom. What is at stake, when you find yourself in the position of desperately seeking to hear the voice of the oppressed? How often might “we” be counterproductive to a progressive political project we presume are an essential part of? These are the questions I take from the play and which I deal with. A shift from a politics of voice to a politics of listening is feminist and we owe this proposition 100 percent to a feminist bibliography: Nancy Rose Hunt, Judith Butler, Houria Bouteldja, Marianne Constable and the discourse analysis work of Dr Deborah Cameron and Dr Diana Eades. I try to embody this shift and perform it through the work I am making. I can see that this shift itself has turned into a dispositive, which is also a form of expression or manifestation of a patriarchal structure – to order and idealise ideas. At the same time, the methodological principles that I owe my work to belong within a completely different gendered space, within oral historiography and the specific space that sound plays within. Sound is why we turn to listening and especially should do so when facing or hearing about sexual violence. This specific violence has and still is often deemed as unspeakable and taboo, and therefore, seldom has it been recorded or has it entered historical space.

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The feminist methodologies I am thinking about, work against or undermine this very notion of impossible speech: listening for impossible speech, which is not recorded, and producing techniques by which you measure negative space and silence, rather than simply speaking for or on behalf of someone. These methodologies and almost entirely new forms of discourse analysis we really owe to feminist practitioners in the 1970s and to historians who have rethought the forms of testimony and sought new forums, through which different testimonies could be heard. An inspiring, feminist story I recently read was the novel The Chorus of Mushrooms by Hiromi Goto (1994) and in particular, one scene, which also speaks to your work, I believe. The story is about the intergenerational relations between three women, a grandmother, a mother and a daughter, and their first, second, third generation experience of migrating, or to be precise, f leeing from Japan to Canada. In the scene, which lingered with me, the daughter asks the mother to clean her ears with a sharp needle. It was compelling to read this and form an image in mind about how you would give your body, your most sensitive organ into the hands of another. I thought about the tenderness and care involved in that personal ritual and the bodily co-dependency. What role does this bodily vulnerability and co-dependency play in your work? LAH: I can speak to that through my works. This Whole Time There Were No Landmines and Language Gulf in the Shouting Valley [2013] more specifically. [AM: This Whole Time There Were No Landmines (2017) is a very loud audiovisual installation, using found mobile phone footage recorded on 15th May 2011 in the so-called “shouting valley”, where since 1967 Druze families living between Palestine/Israel and Syria shout across to friends and family on the other side. It records the event described by Hamdan in the interview through brief visual snippets and shakily recorded images, and a plethora of voices shouting across, through and with another. Protesters gathered on the Syrian side of the border fence, and unexpectedly, around 150 of them crossed the border and broke into Israeli territory.] AM:

In 2011, there is an interesting moment, which I witnessed and sought to articulate and document: when the Syrian–Israeli border is breached in the so-called Shouting Valley. I would guess that 150 Syrian and Palestinian arrived at the border to protest that day. These protesters actually broke down the border itself and temporarily enacted their right to return. The Shouting Valley has divided families who have lived there since before 1967, since the annexation of the Golan Heights. Ever since, they have shouted across the border to communicate with each other. Their practice of shouting iterates a first kind of fissure in the border, presenting a continuous act of defiance. Subsequently, their shouting led to the breaking of the border itself, its

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temporary material destruction, which finally allowed the bodies to travel across again. It was utterly important that this was a bodily, physical crossing. Although they could call by phone on the other side of the border and use electronic communication, it was this tangible bodily presence to be there at the border and shout across and have your voice land on the ears of the other person, there in the f lesh. Here again, we encounter the old idea that sound leaks across borders, except on that day when the border was breached in 2011, the same voices who have been shouting across for years and decades, created the kind of material cracks in the border, which allowed it to break and opened the possibility for bodies to move. And what happened next? Immediately, family members started screaming from the top of their lungs at the top of their voices’ capacity to stop the bodies from crossing: “Stop, stop, stop! There’s landmines! You’re going to get blown up. There’s landmines, landmines, landmines. Stop, stop …”. Later, it became clear that this whole time, there were no landmines, which is also the title I chose for documenting this moment revealing the limits of body within the voice: “This whole time there were no landmines”. You can also see a contentious relation between the physical and the symbolic space, the imaginary violence of the border was of course, actually what was sustaining the border this whole time. Over decades, these families would paradoxically both resist the border through shouting across it, and at the same time, sustain it through this violence imaginary of invisible landmines, waiting underneath the ground to explore and erupt. This imaginary became more powerful and more performative than the actual banal reality of the Israeli’s border fence. Indeed, what I am trying to activate in my work is this very tension between material fact, innate violence and imaginary, understanding it through sound as both physical and political or imaginary space. Listening is not about sound, per se, but about acting politically as well as physically. Spectacular moments such as in the Shouting Valley speak even more to a kind of quotidian experience of violence, through violent forms of listening, and it teaches us about our relationship to walls or even other architectures, like the internet for example, which do both: expose and protect us, connect and surveil. This is where the idea of freedom and the discourse of liberation meets the idea of containment or incarceration, and the discourse of protection, or even the classic rendering of the law. AM:

I find an exciting dynamic in your work: I immensely enjoy the aesthetic, at times, enigmatic experience of engaging with images, well told stories, sounds. At the same time, it stimulates me because it presents highly complex conf licts and is theoretically challenging. You have undertaken higher education in the UK and graduated from Goldsmiths University with a PhD. What are your thoughts on the future of the academy and what could be its role in creating more radically diverse and inclusive futures? What demands might you have for critical theory, which seeks to engage with borders in our world today?

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I have to admit, thankfully, I have the privilege to not depend on the academy. I think if I did it would have been a problem. Unfortunately, I think quite bleakly about the future of the academy, and I am sure you would agree. Recent events, including in the institution in which I studied and did my PhD in, Goldsmiths, showed that it’s just so kind of revolting. What can I really say about that? My participation within the academy is always very privileged in the sense that it has existed in a kind of parallel space, which I went to and visited from time to time. However, I certainly benefited from its patriarchal nature: thinking back about the ways in which, even in the most radical classrooms, the distribution of voices was regulated, is painful. I think the whole idea of the University is predicated upon the interface between two kind of oppressed people: the staff and the students, and everything else about it sits in some kind of abstract relation to that interface. Unfortunately, faculty often come to embody this position of the oppressor, while their own position within the system is as messy. AM: I am thinking here too about my own position as teaching about performance, migration and politics in higher education, and in so doing, aiming for subversive acts. As a university teacher in the UK, you are obliged to keep a weekly record of who and what bodies are actually present in the classroom. This record-keeping presents a kind of extended monitoring device of the Home Office and a cloak, under which the absence and presence of international students are monitored, rather than all students. In reality, when I teach classes, this is the first major issue I confide in to them. It is my teaching ethos to get to know my students and after the first few sessions I usually build rapport and can say, without a record sheet, who might be absent and I need to check-in with on a more personal basis, if there is an issue or problem. As my teacher and friend Alison Phipps expressed, we academics also act as border guards on a daily basis in UK classrooms through monitoring absences and facilitating voice distribution, reading lists and what not [Bagelman and Cinnamon 2018]. What appears at first glance as helpful and innocent record sheets, reveal themselves to be part of a much larger bureaucratic state machine, and part of persistent everyday violence and discrimination against migrants. LAH: Policies such as the one you describe stem from the period when Theresa May was Home Secretary between 2010 and 2016, and they completely changed lives, including my own. LAH:

All the theoretical journeys I have been on never really came through the academy. I learned so much more from speaking with people who survived Saydnaya, or engaging with the DIY music scene. The university is not the only place where learning and teaching have to happen. For example, I never went to an art school in the style of a studio-based practice and to me, I never felt that this was a productive place for an artist to be: with other artists.

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In regard to working with other artists and/or experts and DIY learners and teachers from other fields, could you tell me more about your relationship with Forensic Architecture and also Amnesty International? In what ways do you approach working with these organisation, what are the potentials and limits of this kind of work? How is it different from working in the “artworld”? What regimes of representation did you encounter? LAH: I mean there is a common misconception when people talk about my work, and I think it is productive to address this. This presumed binary between the “real-world stuff ” I work on and the “artworld stuff ” I do seems wrong. Despite all the issues we might have with the white cube space of the gallery, it nevertheless is still the place that I can decide the conditions by which one encounters my work, testimony or speech. The conditions of listening are here available to me to create, more than in any other space. That is why the aesthetic and spatial practice comes in, because if I work for Amnesty International, or if I am speaking in a court of law, or if I am on the news, or a piece I am dealing with is on the news, those forums create very tight and very limited aesthetic conditions. What emerges as significant within these forums is of extremely narrow bandwidth in my opinion. Therefore, the gallery allows me to continually expand and contest those conditions. AM:

This is why aesthetic practice is so important, you always oppose a wall on two fronts: finding new ways through which we experience and tell stories on one side, and appealing to the news itself or cycles in which we receive information, which are themselves an aesthetic project. That might seem obvious within an academic context, but I have often experienced that my audiences and critics say “why am I hearing about Saydnaya in a gallery, when I should be hearing about it in the news?” What underpins this view is the idea that on some level, what might be implicit in what is being said is that “this does not belong here, this does not belong in the gallery”. Instead there seems to be a misconceived understanding that my work belongs only to an aesthetic frame that they might be more comfortable with or used to when exploring such subject matter, e.g., the news and the way it talks, cuts and shows images. It is about the way we are trained, as in academia, to analyse these images and representations. Even a kind of audience, who has been made aware of their own aesthetic habits, still reverts back to a binary tension when encountering some of the works I made. In April 2018, I experienced the 28 min video work by Hamdan about his investigation into the Saydnaya prison complex, a site of illegal detention and torture located 30 km from Damascus in Syria, as part of the exhibition Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, London. In 2016, Hamdan was commissioned by Amnesty International to conduct interviews with torture survivors who

[AM:

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gave witness to their experiences, predominantly the sounds and noises they overheard while being confined in enforced darkness and silence. Not only did the survivors not see the place, no visual documents exist from inside the prison. Therefore, together with the witnesses, Hamdan recreated the prison architecture through words and survivors’ descriptions of acoustic memories alone. Writing about Hamdan’s 2019 exhibition piece, Saydnaya (the missing 19db), the theatre scholar Georgina Guy has positioned his work in relation to “new dramaturgical approaches to trauma and making claims that go beyond affective representation” in performance works and argues that (Guy 2019, 110) there is an “imperative on visitors to join in this act of acoustic witnessing [which] situates those attending to the installation in a different relation to its subject than is the case with figurative depictions or performances centred solely on affect.” (Guy 2019, 112)]. Sometimes audiences simply did not see or read about Saydnaya in the news, maybe they were reading Art Review that week and missed it. It feels at odds when I get told by audiences that I should put my energy into bringing the issue of Saydnaya into the news and work on advocacy, while Saydnaya was the biggest case Amnesty worked on in 2016 and millions of people saw the investigative work we did through other channels and without my name being attached to it. The curator Catherine David, e.g., critiqued that I was “manipulating” the voices of the people who survived Saydnaya in the gallery, when actually, she only can know about Saydnaya through the work I did with the survivors. The voices and testimonies she heard in the news and read about in the Amnesty documentation were coming through my interviews and transcriptions. What is at stake here is the presumption about the figure of the artist who would come in and take the subject matter and manipulate it and turn it into an artwork. However, the inverse is true: I seek to create the very conditions by which we all can understand and grasp the issue. That idea of an original, untouched subject material is really confusing these spaces of fact and that a factual original actually exists. What I respond is that of course, I am manipulating those voices – again based on her assumption that when she reads the newspaper, the voices represented therein would not have been manipulated. Coming back to the question of storytelling, all modes of storytelling demand manipulation. There is a political demand to manipulate voices, there is no other way to craft a story. Exactly that is why we have developed strategies that enable us to create a politics we think matters, and to negotiate the manipulation on more or less equal footing. Nevertheless, you have to manipulate a voice in order to tell a story, or in order to represent something. To say that people who give witness and especially those who gave witness to their survival of Saydnaya, do not understand that, means stupefying them. I get it, there is something complicated about understanding why I bring this subject matter into the gallery space. The journey of Saydnaya is a perfect example of this. I was asked by Amnesty International to take part in the

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investigation and interview the survivors, and I had no desire to make any kind of artistic work on it after. The idea was that the interviews would go into the human rights report conducted by Amnesty International about Saydnaya. The kinds of questions I was being asked to solicit meant that I had to prepare by reading all the pre-interviews and initial reports and material on the prison complex, but if I were to do it again I would have asked entirely different questions. The point is that the formative conditions I was operating in forced a certain kind of significance on those voices. However, in the very moment of the interviews, I understood that there was something much more significant to what they were saying. I felt a rupture between those two spaces: on the one hand, the human rights report and its own political demands for a specific aesthetic and content, and on the other hand, that I came away from the interviews and genuinely had my way of thinking about the relation of sound to violence, to architecture, to memory, to testimony fundamentally changed. My subsequent gallery works were not about Saydnaya, per se, but they were lessons and ref lections from Saydnaya, seeking to create a context for the things that were omitted from the human rights report to emerge. This was not meant as advocacy work in the sense of “giving voice to that”, but about thinking through different modes of truth production, which can operate at the same time. My work tries to offer a more lucid way of understanding the violence exerted upon those people in that place, but also the way in which we understand violence more fundamentally, violent encounters that we all potentially have experienced in different forms. There are these shifts you feel as if the ground is moving from under you, in those interviews, where noticeably, something else is lingering and there, but the questionnaire path you are on continues, although you are metaphorically knocked off your feet from recognising something different than what you are asking about. Based on your experience of working with Amnesty International and as human rights investigator, how would you colour your relationship with human rights? What does this ethical legal framework mean to you? What role do human rights play in your work? In your methodology or collaborations? LAH: Human rights are basic. This is a really important question because I think we have lost the sense that human rights are the most fundamental basic thing. Even fighting for them sometimes feels so abhorrent because you are upholding and sustaining some of the most brutal violences in order to make those claims, i.e., the right for someone to live. It can only be the most horrible experience of having to make that claim on behalf of a person you are trying to protect, and it is also offensive to the suffering being, to not be innately regarded as having the right to be alive. AM:

Human rights is a field which has incredibly intelligent practitioners and what I have learned through working with Amnesty is that they are totally adaptive to a lot of popular critique. The problem is that the world still put

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them there, into the position of having to make human rights claims and to defend the human rights of others. It’s a catch-22: they both defy violence and, e.g., in the case of Rubber Coated Steel, you see that human rights essentially are used as a means to defend the use of rubber bullets, although this of course legitimises forms of violence, which are otherwise also brutal. These legal questions of the “lesser lethal” or the “lesser evil” which Eyal Weizmann speaks about too, human rights exist within a systemically violent structure. Rubber Coated Steel (2016) is a 21min video work which depicts a concrete, bunker-like place that is a highly stylised indoor shooting range. Five different rectangular plates with a blue/green colour spectrum hang from target retrieval carriers, whose mechanical whirring we hear, when they are being moved back and forth. At times the camera zooms in and shows a detail of different photographic prints that are hanging from the carriers instead of the colour spectrum. Without hearing it, the caption details a formal courtroom interview between a judge, prosecutor and witness. With this video, Hamdan documents his aural investigation for the human rights organisation Defence for Children International, working as part of Forensic Architecture. Meticulously he analyses recorded sound evidence from a case where Israeli soldiers shot and killed two teenagers, Nadeem Nawara and Mohamad Abu Daher in the West Bank. In particular, in his video, Hamdan uses audio software to visualise the ballistic sound frequencies of the gunshots which witnesses recorded on their phones. The legal question at stake was whether the soldiers had “only” used rubber bullets as they defended themselves or whether they had actually fired live ammunition and, in doing so, broken the law. The sound evidence Hamdan conducted proves the latter, and forced the state of Israel to renounce its original denial of the killings.]

[AM:

It is troubling to see how people make human rights discourse spread to disciplines where it has – theoretically and ideally – no business being. I am thinking here for example about the Black Lives Matter movement. To even invoke the idea of being alive is for me already taking steps backwards, because I think the path forward was not ready to take yet. What we tend to forget is that the Black movement was a civil rights movement, rather than about human rights. Black people demanded that the laws of the citizen be applied, not that they be recognised within the basic conditions that human rights allow to see them and perform. That is why I think the formulation of “Black Life Matters” is more important because it speaks to political life, social life and cultural life, it speaks to all the ways in which rights matter and materialise. I also understand why it is called “Black Lives Matter” and of course, as a movement, it is in itself not ignoring these shifts in perspective. However, when I see it circulating particularly among non-American white people on social media, their logic is applying a human rights discourse

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to this movement. To be clear, I am not criticising Black Lives Matter as a movement, instead I am criticising some of the ways in which it is being disseminated among people who attach it to a human rights discourse. The problem remains that we are still in need of the human rights discourse. Through participation in human rights organisations and movements, I wholeheartedly believe that you must insert yourself in these spaces and practices, to compromise politically despite knowing that it is not all equally your politics, and yet to understand how these systems function and operate and contribute to some extent to our understanding of human rights, to teach them. Strategically, you gotta play withdraw and you gotta play participation, and you have to do that almost at the same time. Speaking of withdrawal and participation, you have characterised the UK border as one that is extremely violent because it upholds the false promise of being porous and open, if you only have the right amount of money in your banking account and hold the right passport and or speak in the right accent and language. Your works tackle contemporary border regimes in many different forms and on different layers, you expose them as being paradoxically both, a mere fiction, a narrative, a story – and also a physical demarcation, a direct cause of and for perilous violence. That in mind, what do you make of this phrase “migratory belonging”, or where do you belong? LAH: I have always been contested spaces of belonging. I am trying to always find ways in which I am being seen as plural, to also work with the voice to show its unfaithfulness, that it does not correspondent with Western ways of jurisprudence and truth production, where your voice is very much connected with your self and identity. I have always played characters; I appear as whoever and wherever people want me to. AM:

Conclusion The injunction “to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” in court hearing proceedings reiterates the conditional relation between the law, the ear and the voice – many different clusters of voices and ears are necessary for power and/or the law to be executed. Tensions between the frailty of language and the “reliability” of words may cause severe harm, but in some cases they may also open up possibilities for strategic acts of resistance or acts of equivocation – depending on the very modes of listening at work. Giving testimony and producing truth seem to be structurally similar in the specific language ecologies of documentary political theatre and courts of law. Carol Martin describes documentary theatre as agentive in the way that it “strategically deploy[s] the appearance of truth, while inventing its own particular truth” (Martin 2006, 11). Similarly to courts of law, theatre forensically constructs a path of evidence that serves as a pretext for the testimony of actors, just as evidence functions for the testimony of witnesses and lawyers in court.

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While the artistic realm of theatre is seen to serve as a non-legislative opportunity to exercise the freedom of speech, Hamdan renegotiates this exercise in the legal realm, suggesting the possibility of extricating oneself from the obligation to speak “the truth”, to give voice, instead obtaining the right to silence. Hamdan’s reappraisal of staying quiet and listening seems to be a somewhat controversial idea – especially in the face of a contemporary political apparatus that makes use of what Emma Cox has analysed as the “bureaucratic re-description of reality [which is] meant to silence response” (Cox 2016). This bureaucratising of language and policing of voice forcefully help to protect national borders from an overf low of what are cast as “illegal” bodies and their symbolically and materially or racially othered voices. Born out of precarious legal frameworks, silence is an extremely risky and fallible survival strategy when it comes to border crossings and asylum claims. But when asking ourselves what we can learn from performances about alternative understandings of belonging or identity and about the shifting borders in Europe, the discussed body of work by Hamdan brings forth a new form of political agency. Hamdan offers an alternative complex ethical relation that exceeds current political and bureaucratic truth production, which is based upon an unjust legitimisation of naturalised practices of exclusion. Documentary political theatre can be seen to bring a voice to the voiceless, trigger issues of responsibility through affect and confound notions of authenticity and illegitimacy; however, Hamdan’s works do not affect through their aesthetics alone, but instead formally intervene in the discourse of how subjects are constituted, suggesting that this occurs through the act of listening rather than speaking. Beyond challenging the immateriality of state-related surveillance and identity authentication, his documentaries make us reconsider the limits of our often biased listening-out for refugee-ness in a society already entangled with processes of constant migration. Through engaging with Hamdan’s works, this chapter has shown that an intricate part of the asylum-seeking process is storytelling and the listener’s judgement of the stories – whether it occurs in the immigration office or in the theatre. As the Scottish poet Tom Leonard illustrates in the verses cited in the opening of the chapter, and as Hamdan clearly demonstrates with his emphasis on listening, it is not just that the story of migration is itself a commodity within politics, law and the arts; the very terms upon which one is heard are crucial. Clearly, we all need to become better listeners to create a more just and radically inclusive world.

References Apter, Emily, “Shibboleth: Policing by Ear and Forensic Listening in Projects by Lawrence Abu Hamdan”, October 56 (2016): 100–115. https://doi.org/10.1162/ OCTO_a_00253

Lawrence Abu Hamdan  113 Bagelman, Jen, and Jon Cinnamon, “Border Enforcement & The University: A Conversation”, Society & Space (2018), https://www.societyandspace.org/ articles/border-enforcement-the-university-a-conversation (accessed 06 Nov 2020). Couldry, Nick, Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism, Los Angeles, CA/London: Sage (2010). Cox, Emma, “To Permit Refusal”, Contemporary Theatre Review 26.4 (2016), https:// www.contemporarytheatrereview.org/2016/to-permit-refusal/ (accessed 23 January 2017). Dziuban, Zuzanna (ed.), “Introduction: Forensics in the Expanded Field”, in: Mapping the Forensic Turn: Engagements with Materialities of Mass Death in Holocaust Studies and Beyond, Vienna: New Academic Press (2017), 7–37. Forensic Architecture, “Forensic Listening” (n.d.[a]), https://www.forensicarchitecture.org/file/forensic-listening/ (accessed 22 June 2018). Forensic Architecture, “Project” (n.d.[b]), https://www.forensic-architecture.org/ project/ (accessed 23 Jan 2017). Forensic Architecture (eds.), Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, Berlin: Sternberg Press (2014). Gibson, Sarah, “Testimony in a Culture of Disbelief: Asylum Hearings and the Impossibility of Bearing Witness”, Journal for Cultural Research 17.1 (2013): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2011.613221 Grimes, Charles, Harold Pinter’s Politics: A Silence Beyond Echo, Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (2005). Guy, Georgina, “Art Museums and Audibility: Invisible action and acoustic reporting in Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Earwitness Theatre (2018)”, Performance Research 24.7 (2019): 110–116. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2019.1717875 Hamdan, Lawrence Abu, “Aural Contract: Forensic Listening and the Reorganization of the Speaking Subject”, Cesura Acceso: Music, Politics and Poetics 1 (2014): 200–224. Hamdan, Lawrence Abu, [inaudible] A Politics of Listening in 4 Acts, Berlin: Sternberg Press (2016). Kreuger, Anders, “Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Trilogy of Truth”, Afterall 39.6 (2015): 60–73. Lacey, Kate, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age, Oxford: Polity Press (2013). Lavender, Andy, Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement, London: Routledge (2016). Leonard, Tom, Reports from the Present: Selected Work, 1982–94, London: Jonathan Cape Original (1995). Luckhurst, Mary (ed.), “Verbatim Theatre, Media Relations and Ethics”, in: Mary Luckhurst (ed.), A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell (2008), 200–222. Marschall, Anika, “To Speak the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth – About Political Performances of Listening”, Platform 11.1 (2017): 67–87. Marschall, Anika, and Ann-Christine Simke, “Towards a Forensic Aesthetic: Theatre’s Creative Alliance With Technosciences”, Lecture at the Conference “Systemic Crisis in European Theatre”, Goethe-Institut London (28 April 2018). Martin, Carol, “Bodies of Evidence”, The Drama Review 50.3 (2006): 8–15. https:// muse.jhu.edu/article/201932/pdf

114  Lawrence Abu Hamdan Martin, Carol (ed.), “Introduction: Dramaturgy of the Real”, in: Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2010), 1–14. Stickler, Markus, “The Inf lected Voice: The Relationship between Sound and Power in Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s The Freedom of Speech Itself ”, Allover Magazine 10 (2016): 16–21. Tret’iakov, Sergei, “The Biography of the Object”, October 118 (2016): 57–62. https:// doi.org/10.1162/octo.2006.118.1.57 Wake, Caroline, “The Politics and Poetics of Listening: Attending Headphone Verbatim Theatre in Post-Cronulla Australia”, Theatre Research International 39.2 (2014): 82–100. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883314000029 Weizman, Eyal, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, London: Verso (2007). Weizman, Eyal, and Thomas Keenan, Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics, Berlin: Sternberg Press (2012).

5

Human rights and institutional imagination

A small, lush, green river island in the Mosel region near the small town of Schengen in Luxembourg. It is late summer 2014 and six lawyers, legal scholars, political scientists and NGO workers, as well as two children and some sheep, have set up camp here for a brief twenty-four-hour stay. They discuss, argue, dance and celebrate. They make a fire, sing, write and eat. They investigate global justice. The group has been invited by the white, cis-male German artist duo Hannes Seidl and Daniel Kötter to collaborate and investigate a set task for twenty-four hours. Their assignment: to create a new transnational law that is more just than the existing international legal practices. The artists have arranged their campsite on Mosel island in a specific way, including small tents for sleeping, a large tent for social gatherings, a wooden stage and lectern, wooden benches and tables, catered food, paper, pens and f lipcharts. They are also accompanied by the six-piece band Ensemble Nadar, who perform both improvisation and a classical-oriented concert during the day, and dance music during the evening celebrations. Seidl and Kötter film the unfolding events, recording footage that will later form part of their music theatre performance RECHT Ökonomien des Handelns 2 (2015). For more than ten years, Seidl, a composer, has collaborated with Kötter, a documentary and experimental filmmaker. They started collaborating on the trilogy Ökonomien des Handelns (Economies of Action) in 2013. The trilogy deals with immaterial systems of social action and ran until 2016. Ökonomien des Handelns comprises three music theatre works: KREDIT (2013), RECHT (2015) and LIEBE (2016) – translated, respectively, as credit, law and love. This trilogy brings together video documentary and contemporary live music. The works, which vary in their set up, are shown at performance art festivals and theatres. In these performances, the video documentaries are projected onto a large screen and their action and images enter into a dialogue with live, on-stage accompaniment; this music may include ensembles, choirs, sound artists and installed instruments. In RECHT, the group of lawyers, legal scholars, political scientists and NGO workers are asked to reimagine a global justice system at the very site where, almost three decades earlier, the first Schengen Treaty of 1985 was

DOI: 10.4324/9781003110293-6

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Figure 5.1 Hannes Kötter and Daniel Seidl, RECHT. Ökonomien des Handelns 2, Mousonturm Frankfurt. 2015. Courtesy the artists.

signed aboard a boat. Since this treaty was introduced, and at the time of writing, passport and other border controls have been abolished between twenty-two of the twenty-eight EU member states as a result of the treaty. As I have discussed regarding the Centre for Political Beauty’s interventions and contemporary ad hoc EU politics, the treaty has become more fragmented over the last few years. The question of “what a border-crossing body may find means to do within and without the limits of its representation” continues to confront and confound Europe (Cox and Zaroulia 2016, 141). The RECHT performance is located at the so-called Dreiländereck or tripoint, where the territorial boundaries of France, Luxembourg and Germany meet. On land, such points can be precisely demarcated by visual markers such as pillars, monuments or signs, but when they are located in water – be it in lakes, the open sea or rivers such as the Mosel – such markers are absent, and the exact location of tripoints can be unclear. Note that lake and river boundaries have the same legal status as land boundaries, unlike maritime borders, which are defined by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Space and the legal, political and performative practices that produce it, confine it, exclude it or open it up, are what Kötter and Seidl deal with in their dramaturgy. A video documentary is shown on a large screen on stage, offering a starting point for the musicians’ improvisation and allowing them to literally set the tone for the film’s events, dialogues and encounters to be

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interpreted. Having both spatial systems collide, performing with and against each other, lies at the core of the dramaturgical decisions made: on the one hand, there are the video and visuals, presenting the working through of a set task and the dynamics of group interaction; on the other hand, the audience experiences the music and sound, the live improvisation on stage in response to these visuals. The Ensemble Nadar sometimes sit at a platform constructed from wooden pallets, tuning or playing their instruments. The ensemble members may, at times, walk close to the screen, sit down in front of it and watch the video for a period. At other times, some of them will pack their instruments away, walk behind the screen and disappear for a few minutes, only to reappear again. On occasion, the whole ensemble will stand in a row at the edge of the stage and rhythmically scrape tin cans together or tear up sheets of white paper. The soundscape and music here function within their own system of rules: they are governed sometimes by sheet music, sometimes by the objects at hand, sometimes by the video editing and sometimes by a semiimprovisational approach. It is a soundscape, rather than a movie soundtrack, that unfolds throughout the performance. The video shows a different system of rules being negotiated, one which operates within the theatrical or social experiment in which the group on the island participate. As audience members, we see how they introduce themselves to each other, how they decide whether to eat vegetarian food or meat during the barbecue and what songs they choose to sing together. We see them dance as well as engage in an ongoing discussion about the possibility of a new global justice system; and we see them quickly dismiss one suggestion that they compose a music score rather than a critically informed essay. How can law look, read and be formed in a way that actually brings about justice and equality for everyone in the world? It simply cannot. At least, this is the answer given by the judicial and political experts on the island at the end of the performance experiment. Rather than imagining something bold, progressive or radical, inventing a new critical legal language, completely rethinking law and global justice, or even rejecting the task altogether, the six participants lament the impossibility of the task. Presented towards the end of the video documentary and performance, the response of the lawyers, legal scholars and NGO workers finally reads as follows: “the task that has been set for us is an impossible task. Law can never be innocent or perfect”. My position is not that of a critic, analysing and judging the participants’ legal expertise, critical thinking and use of theoretical concepts as they respond to the set task. Rather, this chapter will focus upon the dramaturgical query of the work: it will consider practices of instituting and examine how contemporary performance artists are initiating new modes of political organisation across Europe and beyond. Pascal Gielen observes a recent shift in terms of what artists are expected to accomplish in their work: in the contemporary world, “creativity is often equated with ‘problem-solving’, which is something else entirely than causing problems or, rather, problematizing

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issues, a task that was until recently reserved for the artist or dabbler” (Gielen 2013, 23). Likewise, in RECHT, an elite group of white and mostly male legal scholars are invited to do what they do in their instituted practices of the everyday in the academy, NGOs and courtrooms: they think about law, analyse legal form and discuss notions of justice in a rationalistic, informed and critical manner. This suggests a question: How might performance enable a more radical institutional critique, a confounding of already instituted practices of thinking, acting and imagining such complex issues as asylum and statelessness which affect all our lives? In this chapter, I turn towards questions of performance, institutional critique and institutional transformation (if not their abolition and decolonisation). We need new registers for political performances, ones which go beyond the temporariness of aesthetic events and respond to cultural longing for sustenance and social justice. Therefore, in this chapter, I build on the previous chapters’ focus on the theatrical public sphere and the politics of listening. In doing so, I introduce the notion of the institution into my overall discussion of performing human rights. We clearly need powerful transnational institutions such as the UN, which enshrined human rights on a global scale in the first place. As Monica Ross’s performance Anniversary demonstrates, every single term in the declaration had to be carefully negotiated and drafted, requiring a far longer period of time than the twenty-four hours given in RECHT. The declaration seeks to address “all peoples and all nations” and to promote co-operation between states to envision a better world, particularly in response to the decades of wars, genocides and discrimination against minorities preceding the declaration’s inauguration. As Francesca Klug noted on the declaration’s seventieth anniversary: “it is striking how virtually every UDHR Article begins with the word ‘everyone’” (Klug 2018). As shown in my introduction, despite the UN’s importance in the protection of human rights, its approach has been continually challenged from both feminist and post-colonial perspectives. Although both the UN and the EU employ a federalist system of collaboration, they present “perhaps the most contemporary libertarian practice […] and are guided not so much by doctrinaire or administrative management, but by moralistic and ethical self-regulation” (Savage and Symonds 2018, 13). While both make possible international collaboration for bettering socio-political futures, they are also deeply problematic institutions exactly because representation and political agency here are limited to the idea of citizenship and the sovereign national. The white dominance of abstract human rights discourse and its unequal materiality condition rights claims and the phenomenology of rights violations. Universal human rights discourse and hence human rights institutional enforcements are grounded in philosophical, political and legal traditions, which are “oblivious to the existence of the structural inequality among different governed populations out of which [they] had emerged” (Azoulay 2015, 12). The institutionalisation of human rights as enshrined in the UDHR also “contributed to silencing the varied and numerous performances of rights by

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different groups, marginalizing those who struggled in the name of rights – not necessarily inscribed in those declarations – and against their violation” (Azoulay 2015, 12). While looking at different artistic interventions, I consider what it might mean to allow people positioned across and (dis)advantaged by different intersectional structures to participate in transnational democratic decision-­making: to create performative assemblies enabling other(ed) political agents to be heard, to access and use their rights on their terms. Different from RECHT’s gathering of recognised legal experts, other artworks provide a critical platform for those denied political representation, giving them a long-term platform to discuss rights and justice in a post-national context. As demonstrated in my previous chapter on the politics of listening, the bureaucratic language of law means it is not accessible to most people. Its interpretation is undertaken only in legal discourse by experts, that is, by those whom powerful institutions recognise as knowledgeable. Building on this, I identify a paradigmatic shift towards institutional transformation in theatre and performance as well as ­theatre and performance studies, with its inherited colonially and empirically white ­dominated epistemologies, discourses and methods.

Institutional critique as analytical tool This chapter is not an analysis of acting registers, intermedial performances or the participation of non-professional performers in theatre, since such an analysis would require a dedicated study of its own. However, we should note that in RECHT, rationalistic political discourse and legal philosophy are linked with the imaginative potential of performance art. I have traced such linkages in the interventions analysed so far in the book: these interventions suggest that performance has the potential to bring human inter-relationality, vocal plurality, embodiment and storytelling into legal discourse, serving as a means to investigate possibilities for a pluriversal global justice system. However, the documented negotiation of a better and more just global legal system in RECHT merely reproduces the whiteness of the discourse of global justice, its hegemonic power structures, racisms and naturalised practices of exclusion. Rather than a plurality of voices, we see instituted experts experienced in practising law in democratic, stable Western European countries: a group of highly educated, white, middle-aged people who work in higher education or as lawyers, and who discuss an abstract and utopian legal world order in what could be called a politically correct, rationalistic and critically informed manner. Yet this thesis examines a notion of human rights that questions their abstract universality in the face of entrenched race, gender and ethnic inequalities; a notion that merits different understandings of expertise, and of who counts as a judicial expert. The live improvised music in RECHT could potentially move beyond this reproduction of instituted, disciplined norms of knowledge accumulation and rationalistic expert discourse, but the performance instead creates a sort of “institutional lock-in” (Balme 2017,

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127). I will return to this idea of institutional lock-in after contextualising the wider trajectories, context and history of institutional critique. While I have opened this chapter by discussing RECHT, I am less interested in a thorough performance analysis of its affects, musicality and images than I am in considering how it illuminates the notion of institutional critique as an analytical method for working through dramaturgical decisions. Simon Sheik has argued that in recent decades there has been a new form of institutional critique which is “not primarily about the intentionalities and identities of subjects, but rather about the politics and inscriptions of institutions (and, thus, about how subjects are always already threaded through specific and specifiable institutional spaces)” (Sheik 2006). Therefore, he argues, we should view institutional critique as a general analytical tool rather than a specific art-historical approach: “a method of spatial and political criticism and articulation that can be applied not only to the artworld, but to disciplinary spaces and institutions in general” (Sheik 2006). While Sheik’s notion of institutional critique seeks to move away from art history, however, his discourse remains embedded in that discipline; I believe it will be productive to critically examine institutional questions and practices of instituting with a performance studies lens. Before doing so, I will first map the trajectories of institutional critique, since it has long been a focus of art history rather than performance studies. I will then identify a recent turn in performance studies towards aesthetics, methods and tasks of institutional transformation, if not towards the decolonisation and abolition of theatre institutions.

Museum Highlights: performing institutional critique Institutional critique describes a systematic examination into the structures, workings, possibilities and confinements of institutions. This critique is not undertaken through rationalistic, intellectual discourse, but rather takes the form of artistic practice. As Julie Bryan-Wilson explains, “[i]nstitutional critique interrogates the ideological, social and economic functions of the art market, particularly museums, patronage, and other mechanisms of distribution and display” (Bryan-Wilson 2003, 89). Artists expressed institutional critique through interventions and practices that tackled the oppressive and exclusionary workings of art institutions in the 1960s. Aesthetically, they exposed and attacked museums, collections or art galleries which were perceived as confining and to be dominating the cultural sphere – particularly those which, for example, received funding from fascist groups. This critique thus posed the institution as an aesthetic, political and theoretical problem for artists. Institutional critique produced artworks which focused upon the administrative apparatus of the art realm: artists began using their practice to question the presumed neutrality of the white cube (mirroring to some extent theatre’s black box). Their critique was conducted against the art institutions’ “ideological and representative social function(s)” (Sheik 2006).

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Andrea Fraser is among the most prominent artists who have performed institutional critique. For example, she delivered five performances in which she impersonated a typical tour guide at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. These were filmed without a live audience and transformed into the single-channel colour video artwork, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989). Directly addressing the camera, Fraser gives her name as “Jane Castleton” and describes herself as a “guest”, “a volunteer” and an “artist”. She is dressed in a grey-brown double-breasted suit, a button-down blouse, knee-length skirt, white stockings and black high heels. The camera then follows her as she performs the guided tour around the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As in a traditional gallery tour, she explains the history of the museum and collection. However, she goes on to give her opinions on the museum’s toilets, cloakroom, drinking fountain and shop. It then becomes difficult to follow her line of thought, because she digresses into broader socio-political ideas and starts quoting, seemingly at random, from writings in the fields of political philosophy and sociology. While performing this subversive mimicry, she gives increasingly exaggerated praise of everyday objects, such an exit sign. A script, including stage directions and a list of citations, was published in the art journal October in 1991. The performance is most poignant when “Jane” emphasises the entanglement of the museum’s history with class issues and augments her explanations with quotations from historic municipal reports about the museum dating back to the 1920s: The Municipal Art Gallery “that really serves its purpose gives an opportunity for enjoying the highest privileges of wealth and leisure to all those people who have cultivated tastes but not the means of gratifying them”. And for those who have not yet cultivated taste, the museum will provide “a training in taste”. (Fraser 1991, 109) Through this approach, Fraser reveals what kind of audience the museum envisages and continues to address: she tells us “what the museum wants – […] what they can give to satisfy the museum” (Fraser 1991, 95). In doing so, she f lips the artistic frame again and again, questioning both the notion of artistic freedom and the rituals of art consumption. Her interaction with the live audience, combined with the work’s emphasis on process and its potential open-endedness, makes Museum Highlights particularly fruitful from a performance perspective. It employs not only a specific turn to performance, but as Shannon Jackson has argued, a specific turn to modes of acting. Fraser’s alternation between distanced, satirical, lucid and serious acting styles allows for complex forms of ref lexivity and, according to Jackson, can be linked to Brecht’s alienation effect: “[a]s Andrea/Jane moved across the museum, from the desk to its galleries, and through its apparatuses, the performance not only showed the seams of acting, but used gestic acting to shows the seams of the art institution” ( Jackson 2011, 121). Fraser’s work

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makes her definition of institutional critique tangible and embodies it: it paradoxically both identifies with the institution and revolts against it. In her own words, “the institution of art is not only ‘institutionalized’ in organizations like museums and objective in art objects. It is also internalized, embodied, and performed by people” (Fraser 2005, 104). Jackson argues that Fraser’s turn to performance was to reveal the institution to be less an object than a process, less static than durational, less a sculpture than a drama. It was to re-enact the recursive, mutually productive formation of an institution in need of repetitive action on the part of social beings. ( Jackson 2011, 125) Drawing on this body of work and these ideas, temporary f leeting performative encounters within institutions generate questions of solidarity, embodiment, physicality, togetherness and vulnerability. They crucially demand more sustainable and durable artistic interventions, which might themselves lead to radically new and different kinds of institutions.

The first, second and third waves of institutional critique Sheik identifies three waves of institutional critique. The first wave emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s and is now celebrated within the canon of art history and exhibited in retrospectives. In this wave, artists used practices of intervention, critical writing or even political activism to address issues. The so-called second wave of the 1980s investigated institutional spaces and practices far beyond the art realm, including the role of the artist herself, who would perform the critique as instituted subject and recognised expert within this realm (as seen in the work of Andrea Fraser, among others). As with the first wave, this movement has become part of the art history canon and educational curricula; both now form part of the art institution itself. Emerging in opposition to these first two waves of institutional critique, Sheik identifies a contemporary third wave. This is “propagated by curators and directors of the very same institutions” that are under critical investigation, and the curators and directors “are usually opting for rather than against them” (Sheik 2006). In contrast to artists’ efforts to dismantle and oppose the art institution altogether in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the institution today is seen not just as part of the problem, but as part of the solution. Thus, we can identify a turn towards understanding institutions as entities that can be shaped, modified and rebuilt. We could say that in this third wave, the administrative apparatus has become the source of aesthetic practice. This turn also speaks to a move from directing critique against something else to critique as a form of continuous self-ref lection. Fraser concludes that the only way forward would be the creation of critical institutions and critically

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instituted actors who understand themselves and their workings, in Sheik’s words, “as part of a larger ensemble of socio-economic and disciplinary spaces” (Sheik 2006). Fraser writes that today, “[w]e are the institution”. It is telling how that “we”, which in earlier periods would have referred to a group of artists working against the institutions, now designates a broad group – including artists, cultural workers, curators, directors and administrators – as aesthetic practitioners of institutional critique. Nevertheless, this remains a group positioned exclusively within the arts. Consequently, as Fraser acknowledges, “institutional critique is more often than not met with the argument that ultimately the artist remains within, and supports, the art-historical discourse and power structures they attempt to alter” (Fraser quoted in Gronlund 2005). This is indicated, for example, by the fact that audiences must typically pay fees to attend lectures by artists, who thus benefit from their position within the institution. Fraser’s work points to the problems arising from any attempt to use one’s own privileged position as an artist within the museum system. Her artist persona presents a powerful agent, rather than a passive recipient of an already coherent symbolic system. She possesses the capacity and infrastructure to participate in the artworld system, rather than merely receive or tolerate it. Following this, the striking question Sheik asks (but which remains open) is: “What and where are the demarcation lines for entry, for visibility and representation?” (Sheik 2006). But if the discourse around institutional critique refrains from actually undoing it and rendering it obsolete, it is crucial to emphasise again that institutional critique is not about subject (or artist) identity but is rather about political workings and performance within/as the institution. With that emphasis, we can indeed use institutional critique as an analytical tool, and arguably most productively so by applying a performance studies lens. As this art-historical perspective on institutional critique shows, the concept of the institution does not simply refer to complex organisational structures. The emergence of neo-institutionalism provides a theoretical framework to understand institutions in relation to performance, as something performed through social scripts and in everyday encounters. Writing about institutional critique from a performance studies perspective, Johanna Linsley ref lects that “performance practice [...] often sees itself as outside or at odds with institutions” (Linsley 2013). Yet, we are part of the institution, too, because we perform it as part of our laws, political paradigms and cultural environments. Here, I refer not only to the art institution and to “we” as an exclusive group within the art realm. I also refer to manifold institutions at work in the various realms in which we operate and live. This understanding enables us to examine performance as a set of social institutions and to consider how these institutions relate to cultural belonging more broadly – be it through interfaces such as censorship, public scandals or advertising (Balme 2014).

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This methodological challenge of thinking through aesthetics and institutional transformation of theatres presents the shifting away from what Christopher Balme calls “the modernist and postmodernist fixation on the evenementiel temporality of the aesthetic dimension of theatre” (Balme 2014, 13–14). As I have written elsewhere, [h]owever non-affective and a-theatrical institutions may seem at first glance, they form part of, are embedded in, and intervene in everyday sensualities; they sanction and police our ways of living together. Institutions such as the theatre, the state, asylum laws, higher education, neoliberalism, the church, the EU, and the UN provide the spaces and rules for our everyday encounters, and our means of communication. (Marschall 2018, 157) Particularly in the arts, institutions set aesthetic norms, such as the troubling notion of “high culture”. They define our tastes and determine our artistic and educational training; they also “invariably operate on the basis of law and impact on collectivities as much as individuals” (Balme 2017, 128), and crucially they outlive individual artists and particular groups.

Institutional transformation and aesthetics While the focus on institutions is not new, the emerging task and focus on theatre aesthetics and institutional transformation in performance studies enables me to question the notion of a collective social subject, which inherently comprises contradicting identities and structural (dis)advantages. I question what kind of jurisdiction is possible beyond instituted legal practice, as well as what kinds of long-term sustainable effects performance art can generate beyond its temporary event aesthetic. Theatre researchers have recently been investigating how theatre institutions and a colourblind notion of theatrical expertise have been institutionalised in the historic period of decolonisation and resulted in racially unequal access to and representation in cultural and artistic institutions between the Global North and South (Balme 2017, 125). Methodologically, this asks theatre researchers to investigate power structures, cultural diplomacy, agendas and money f lows, which “ultimately enable institutions to be instated” (Balme 2017, 127). Thus, theatre research invested in questions of contemporary institutional transformation uses different tools and methods for investigating cultural infrastructures, rather than studying individual playwrights, directors and performances. Of most value to my discussion here is the idea of “institutional lock-in” (Balme 2017, 127), which describes how specific events disseminate practices or critical ideas which get stuck with us and are perpetuated over decades by those in power. I will return to this idea of lock-in in my next chapter, discussing contemporary discourses of immateriality and performance.

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Because theatre is so diverse, we experience it through various specific organisations which change over time. As Christopher Balme writes, the common agreement that theatre as an art form like painting, sculpture, literature, and some forms of cinema is by no means god-given but itself the result of institutionalization processes, the most important of which is public investment in the arts. (Balme 2017, 129) The neo-institutional theorist Paul DiMaggio argues, with reference to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, that “an institution can ‘only become enacted and active’ if it, ‘like a garment or a house, finds someone who finds an interest in it’” (DiMaggio and Powell 1991, 26) and, I add, is in a position of power. This is important insofar as my academic research into the artistic intervention plays an inherent (if somewhat small) role in furthering such institutional interest by contributing to the idea that such interventions should be presented as examples to governmental bodies and policymakers (Phipps 2017). The artistic interventions challenge wider international epistemic research communities, and particularly white dominated epistemologies and methods, because they expose wider institutional violence through pluriversal aesthetics. They respond to the necessity to work towards social justice and prompt the following questions: How do forms of artist organisation relate to concepts of institutionalised expertise? What kind of wider political imbrication does the linkage of artistic practice and political administration, legal procedures, and the military-industrial complex suggest? What strategies, structures and silences compel artists to become “systemically engaged” (Jackson 2011, 5), exposing the fiction of systemic “wholes” or systemic contingency, and supporting the hegemonic normativity of some voices, bodies and identities over others? Within the third wave of institutional critique, I situate the work of performance scholars who engage with institutions beyond the typical emphasis upon their constraints, restrictions and limitations. Tackling the narrative of institutional violence rigorously but f lexibly, the interventions analysed in this book reveal the shortcomings of legislative and executive institutional bodies. Through the artists’ specific focus on and empathy for their participants’ and audiences’ needs and desires (notwithstanding the analysed limits and pitfalls), these interventions show that their status as capable political actors with agency may be taken more seriously in the arts and the theatre than in other institutional contexts. Therefore, the interventions propose multi-disciplinary ways of performing solidarity and political representation through theatre and performance’s material mise-en-scène.

From disruption to creating something more durable The institution: it enables, it makes visible, it obscures, it contains, it constrains. It summons into being a public sphere, whose borders it works to

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maintain. Its violences are procedural and impersonal; its spaces are built to function (but are never un-aesthetic). (Linsley 2018) Seen through a performance lens, it is clear that institutions are performative rather than fixed and unchanging. They are entrenched through social life, through patterns of behaviour, habits and repeated actions. Gigi Argyropoulou and Hypatia Vourloumis approach the figure of the institution from this perspective in their Performance Research issue “On Institutions” (2015). They call for “a performance studies lens that approaches the figure of the institution as a verb”, asking “how institutions are performance and in turn how performance practices may enforce, destabilise and initiate new modes of organisation” (Argyropoulou and Vourloumis 2015, 1). In their introduction, they consider how institutions are established and/or altered through repeated modes of action, and how performative practices may envision new modes of organisation: how we institute. A performance lens and an intricate understanding of theatricality have helped Shannon Jackson to explore how artworks of institutional critique simultaneously reveal material conditions and acknowledge our co-dependency with those conditions. Discussing everyday social realities, she identifies the “tendency to feel inconvenienced by supporting operations” as opposed to “feeling publicly grateful” ( Jackson 2011, 7) for mutual infrastructural relations and support. Yet by looking at emerging artist organisations, which create new forms of collaboration, co-ordination and political accountability, it becomes evident that their practices facilitate new registers for such infrastructural performance. Indeed, artistic interventions are not necessarily critical or progressive in the straightforward sense of having an anti-state or anti-institutional stance. Rather, the case studies I am engaging with in this book actually engage notions of the public and of political agency through practices of decision-making and “imaginary coupling with the state” (Warner 2002, 124). Clearly, when we pursue any kind of performance project or related work, we can never do so completely alone. To anyone who has started even the smallest theatre company, developed their own artistic programme, or helped to produce a performance or show, it is obvious that despite performance’s much discussed ephemerality, it is very much dependent on material and immaterial infrastructures: performance depends on people, their support and labouring bodies. Performing thus often means an invigorating form of labour, an enigmatic or even transformative experience and, more often than not, exhaustion. Performance requires an encounter with some very difficult problems that are both formal and institutional. It installs systems for managing duration and relationality whose consequences cannot be fully foreseen. It anticipates a future that cannot be known but on whose unfoldings its

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identity depends. Performance promises to accommodate within limits collaborating groups of people who do not always know each other and commits to being inconvenienced by the claims that they bring. It endures the conf licts of these commitments of resources. As such, performance processes, like human welfare processes, create sites that know the paradox of such systems – that sustaining support can simultaneously feel constraining. ( Jackson 2011, 41–42) Like Jackson in her book Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, I question “models of political engagement that measure artistic radicality by its degree of anti-institutionality” ( Jackson 2011, 14). While she looks at performance projects and artworks which imagine more sustainable social institutions, here I am expanding her scope by looking at the emergence of artist organisations that imagine and constitute such durable social institutions. In particular, it is necessary to examine what it means not only to sustain the artwork and the lives of artists, but importantly the lives of stateless peoples, those placed outside contemporary political frameworks of recognition.

Performing commitment When looking at the relation between performance and institutions, it is important to stay vigilant regarding artists’ potential ideological collusion with state arts programmes and funds, noting the risks, limits and pitfalls of this relation (Coumans and Straatman 2015). Alternative forms of institutional models such as artist organisations often find themselves caught in a double-edged position, critiquing dysfunctional state institutions while at the same “functioning as ‘band aids’ enabling an easy maintenance of inequalities” (Last 2017, 102). Claire Bishop has elaborated on this issue with reference to socially engaged artworks in the UK: I think that these [arts programmes on diversity] are the kind of projects we have to think about much more carefully and critically than work done within the relatively neutral and staged confines of a gallery space […] I think I am very critical of the instrumentalization of people with respect to long-term artistic projects engaging specific communities with very particular economic or ethnic backgrounds, which receive prioritized government funding in order for culture to ref lect policies of social inclusion through the artificial generation of an audience for a participatory work. (Bishop 2006, 118) In a similar vein, Ellen Feiss has stressed the need to connect artworks to EU cultural policy frameworks, linking artist organisations to the demand for measurable outcomes in the fields of cultural social work and critical arts

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practices (Feiss 2015). As in the higher education sector, the arts are increasingly expected to demonstrate their impact. Thus, it is typically concrete tasks and explicitly realisable solutions that are politically valued, rather than an understanding of art “as of innate public benefit” (Feiss 2015). She further suggests that there is a structural relationship between dominant policy regimes which mandate artistic social outcomes and justice-oriented critical practices: the critical quests of these artistic projects come into existence (and multiply) in an attempt to materially mitigate the intensifying effects of these very policies and their larger, globally inf luential apparatuses. At the same time, practices such as [ Jonas] Staal’s are part of what is made visible in the EU as art, because they articulate themselves, in part, in terms of realizable solutions. This is not to say that these practices align politically with contemporary cultural policy or necessarily reproduce their effects – they espouse “progressive” or radical causes – but it is to argue for the necessity of situating them within this field of appearance and recognizing how the two are linked through the logic of “verifiable” gain. (Feiss 2015) When looking at these regimes of performance within/as institutions, it is not only productive but necessary to ask and interrogate what cultural institutions actually “do” and whether their commitment to asylum issues in their programmes might be “non-performative” (Ahmed 2006). We should ask whether they are merely performing an image of themselves, rather than changing their organisation’s “citizenist”, nationalist, racist, gendered, ableist and unequal status quo. For example, consider the institutional and potentially non-performative commitment of many German state-funded cultural institutions to issues of migration and asylum in their dramaturgical programme during the unfolding of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015 (Marschall 2018). By contrast, some artists genuinely engage with the problem of nonperformative commitment and aim to decolonise politics and enact socio-political change through persistent performative action. In her research on diversity policies in higher education, critical race studies scholar Sara Ahmed defines non-performativity as those utterances which claim an ethico-political stance but do not follow through with real socio-political action. Ahmed uses “non-performativity” to describe how institutions rhetorically commit to diversity without actively doing anything to evince that commitment. She contextualises the problem with commitment as follows: A commitment is often understood as a performative: it is not describing or denoting something; a commitment “commits”. But what seemed to be the case was that commitments were makeable because they were not doable: it seems you can make a commitment because commitments do

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not commit institutions to a course of action. Commitments might even become a way of not doing something by appearing to do something. Understanding the role or function of institutional commitments was to understand how institutions do not do things with words, or how institutions use words as a way of not doing things. (Ahmed 2016, 1) Ahmed explains that to not do anything, to not follow through on a commitment is still an action and can even be a technique. To clarify: commitments to diversity, to safe spaces or to empowering vulnerable groups can easily be adopted by institutions; they can be part of the institutional statement of a municipal theatre, for example, and they often appear in the objectives of theatre projects. However, adopting policies and making declarations can be done without taking action to actually change anything. What is at work in this kind of societal dramaturgy of commitment is non-performativity: a commitment to socio-political change might just be a convenient alibi for stasis, and it might in fact reproduce a racist status quo “by the very appearance of being transform[ative]” (Ahmed 2016, 2). In other work, I have equally re-formulated Ahmed’s academic activist approach and mapped it onto theatre and dramaturgy: “[i]f institutions do words not to do things, then we have work to do, which often means work to do on these words – work to do with these words” (Ahmed 2016, 3). And in terms of performance art, this could mean that if theatre institutions do repertoires and dramaturgical programmes, if performance art gestures towards the real not to do things, then we have work to do – which often means work to do on these paradigms of theatre’s and performance’s undoing; work to do with performativity, with the political efficacy of theatre and performance. For my institutional aesthetic approach here, it is vital to stress once again that we are not outside institutions when we aim to transform the norms governing institutional life, and to stress also that there are high political stakes when examining institutional life – which, in refugee contexts and asylum cases, literally governs the thin line between life and death. (Marschall 2018, 160–161) Cross-disciplinary scholarship which explores complex relationships within works on institutionality (including Ahmed’s notion of non-performativity) highlights the connective tissue, which binds artistic imagination and politico-legal domains. How can artist-run organisational structures open up new models for engagement between performance art and political action? What is implied when artists seek to both imagine and build new worlds? If we are witnessing a shift within political performance from temporary events to artist-run organisations, how can we “emphasize the infrastructural politics of performance”, as Jackson puts it, and “join performance’s routinized

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discourse of disruption and de-materialization to one that also emphasizes sustenance, coordination, and re-materialization” ( Jackson 2011, 29)?

Refugees and temporal displacement Theatre and performance are understood as processual, f leeting and fitful; their ontological disposition is ephemeral. Navigating the field of performance art, how are we to face the political problem of refugee-ness and the need for continued transnational solidarities? How does the lens of performance help us to “create stability, while at the same time engaging in constructive destabilisation” (Last 2017, 103)? How does this turn towards institutions in the arts address the often unbearable slowness of institutional change, the gradual and unpredictable ways in which systems of societal norms evolve? This painful slowness might be evident in issues around forced displacement and refugees, but this realm can also experience institutional changes at rapid and unexpected speed: think of nightly deportation raids, the increasing militarisation of borders or more ad hoc political decisions to open or close borders, such as Germany’s temporary suspension of the Dublin Regulation in August 2015. As Georgina Ramsay ref lects on time and temporality in relation to refugeehood, our personal, shared and culturally different understandings of time “have long been part of how people organise their existence together in meaningful ways” (Ramsay 2018, 14). Processes of othering and marginalisation can also be investigated through a lens of time, questioning whose time and whose histories are recognised as important, and who has shown how understandings of time are historically embedded in imperialist violence. Equally, cultural representations of time and an emphasis on progress, improvement and social reform can inhibit our understanding of a more temporally vexed present, experienced across different racial, gendered, sexualised, ableist and classed structures. Not just geography and mobility, but equally so, temporality and the twenty-first-century idea of the event mark people(s) and their lived experience as Other (Brun 2016; Griffiths 2014; Kallius, Monterescu and Rajaram 2016; Marschall 2020; Ramsay 2018). Therefore, it is necessary to form the idea of the temporal aesthetic event as a crucial mode of performance to focus on lasting organisational structures. Can we understand the turn towards institutions in the arts as a meaningful, long-term response to forced displacement and the perilous state of limbo that many refugees must endure? That is, to critically rebuild our capacity to draw on the future as an orienting point, which might in turn help to anchor us in the present? Georgina Ramsay ref lects on the possible definition of displacement as a process through which a person is unexpectedly ejected from their habitual routines of thought and behaviour and is required to radically rethink themselves in relation to a new, uncertain and often disconcerting projection of the world and future possibilities within it. (Ramsay 2018, 17)

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The artistic interventions examined here aim to reconcile uncertain futures with the longing for a continuous and sustainable everyday life. Indeed, they intervene directly in the condition of spatial and temporal uprooting. Refugees are categorically excluded from the national order of things, and to be displaced is often to lose a sense of “permanence of place” as well as permanence of future: the “experience of being disconnected from temporal rhythms of ordinary life” (Ramsay 2018, 18). Therefore, this chapter paths the way to think and identify those artistic interventions, which perform institutional critique and aim at social justice by systematically creating sustenance and durability, which establish the capacity to project and envision a shared future in the first place. Peter Nyers pinpoints that the refugee condition is “only ever a temporary one” (Nyers 2006, 123). To him, a “remarkable” event took place on 16 June 2001, when for a single day the French National Assembly reconvened itself as the “Assembly of Refugees”: The French parliamentarians invited 577 refugees representing seventy-one nationalities and, together, they passed the Paris Appeal. In it, they made a call to governments around the world to apply the principles of the UN Refugee Convention in a nonrestrictive way to their national refugee legislation. This was a grand and important gesture, to be sure. The Assembly that approved the Rights of Man and the Citizen was now united in speaking about the Rights of the Refugee. But alas, the event lasted only a day. The refugees participated in a highly symbolic gathering that was never meant to endure. In the end, the Assembly of Refugees silently underscored the point that the refugee condition is only ever a temporary one. The refugee remains the aberrant counterpart of the normal(ized) national citizen. (Nyers 2006, 123) Such critique of power relations is more often than not temporary, and while it may gesture towards a more just future, in reality it changes very little. We should not put too much emphasis on such temporary symbolic moments: instead, it is necessary to continually demand temporally sustained initiatives to include refugees as political agents in meaningful and systemic ways. Performance art can effectively highlight pressing issues around inequality of representation and reinvigorate the means of imagining an alternative to refugees’ imposed immobility and chronic waiting. Many who live in indefinite, forced displacement might not even qualify as refugees according to the legal definition in the UN Convention. But even those who do are nonetheless denied either a durable political solution or a permanent safe refuge including relative freedom. Refugees often remain living “more or less outside the bounds of the nation-state system” (Parekh 2017, 4): in transit, in camps or in precarious temporary conditions in countries of arrival. They are paradoxically caught in both transit and

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stasis: between elusive citizenship – with the rights that it brings – and the asylum process, with the rights attached to the legal status of refugee. In this situation, refugees are often denied the right to work, access to healthcare and the freedom to move as they please. Here, Arendt’s famous argument about stateless refugees comes to the fore: refugees embody the inherent contradiction between the universal principle of human rights and the claim to national sovereignty. They live in a state of rightlessness where “the prolongation of their lives is due to charity and to right, for no law exists which could force the nations to feed them” (Arendt 1986, 296). For the stateless, rights are temporally deferred, which exposes the reality that rights are de facto contingent when they ought not to be. While the prevalent narrative of a crisis and associated images – such as those of the “clearance” of the Calais Jungle in late 2016 – express an urgency to act, at the same time they continually reveal a lack of durational impact. The urgency to act speaks to the nature of the crisis itself and stresses the time-sensitive need for physical action to save endangered lives. However, the sense of the crisis’s gravity has also become ubiquitous, being perpetuated by politicians and other political stakeholders alike (Castañeda and Holmes 2016). The need for durable, long-term engagement and the hope of envisioning a just alternative often seem to be superseded by this sense of urgency and the political demand for a radical single solution to the crisis. To enable the sustainable reimagining of social institutions, it is vital to reassess the political stakes of performance and contest our aesthetic registers, rather than perpetuating a traditional “mistrust of structure, bureaucracy and policy” ( Jackson 2011, 24).

Artists who build institutions Artist organisations and alter-institutional models provide compelling case studies of durable interventions into institutions’ representational politics and can engender continued solidarity for refugees, who often remain in isolated and indefinite limbo for years. As opposed to temporary commissioned projects, artist organisations and alter-institutions allow time for long-term collaboration and ref lection. They provide structural support for building networks and nurturing infrastructural relations, instead of applying external pressure for finished stage productions via social entities, audiences, bureaucracies and governments. In her interrogation of political engagement by art projects which take anti-institutional stances and/or reimagine social institutions, Jackson reminds us of the crucial meaning of sustainability: “[w]hen a political art discourse too often celebrates social disruption at the expense of social coordination, we lose a more complex sense of how art practices contribute to inter-dependent social imagining” ( Jackson 2011, 14). In January 2015, Jonas Staal, together with the German freelance dramaturge Florian Malzacher and the Polish independent curator Joanna Warsza, organised a conference entitled “Artist Organizations International” at the

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Hebbel am Ufer theatre production house in Berlin. It is important to note here that this theatre was also the site of the Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer, a theatre collective which built upon the German student movement in 1968 to develop new means of commoning – for example, giving all employees the right to vote on matters of artistic policy. The event was conceived as an assembly, bringing together more than twenty artist organisations to explore the shortcomings of current political, economic, educational and ecological systems. The organisers intentionally refrained from using any political or ideological motif to bring the participants together. The organisations included, among others, Artists of Rojava, Artist Association of Azawad, the Büro für Antipropaganda, Chto Delat, Concerned Artists of the Philippines, Grupo Etcétera, Gulf Labor, Haben und Brauchen, HudRada und ISTM, Immigrant Movement International, the Institute for Human Activities, the International Institute of Political Murder, the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, Performing Arts Forum, Schoon Genoeg!, The Silent University, WochenKlausur, the Centre for Political Beauty and the Forensic Architecture agency. The conference presentations and subsequent discussions are available online for further engagement with panel themes such as propaganda, statelessness and solidarity. Malzacher suggests that these organisations are part of an ongoing “shift from artists working in the form of temporary projects to building longterm organisational structures” (Malzacher, Staal and Hunn 2015). Feeding into that proposed shift and speaking from the perspective of an artist running such an organisation, Staal stated in the conference opening address that unlike “the singular commodified artwork, the artist organisation potentially proposes a restructuring of social relations as such” (Malzacher, Staal and Hunn 2015). The various conference contributions highlighted how the artist organisation’s form impacts the effectiveness of artistic actions and can inf luence the ethical standards of the contexts in which artists work. Dealing with similar examples of instituting practices by artists, the independent curator Sven Lütticken argues that such artworks can be understood as a new, emerging form of institutional critique, because they aim to imagine and rebuild organisational structures. He defines a shift in contemporary artistic practices that moves from temporary projects to the creation of more permanent “alter-institutional” (Lütticken 2015, 6) models. In recent years, many artists have created organisations that are (at least partly) based in the art world and its institutional structures, but that are not art organisations or art institutions – not even alternative ones, in the sense of artist-run spaces. The result is a kind of generalised aesthetic practice that thrives on a pragmatic stretching of boundaries or on the exploitation of the increasing permeability of both institutions and social fields. (Lütticken 2015, 6)

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The explicit emphasis on lasting structures rather than temporary arrangements expresses an artistic and cultural longing for continuity and sustenance. The organisations invited to Artist Organisations International vary widely in form, aims and political ideology, attesting to the plethora of alterinstitutional models. They have a range of different legal statuses: some are foundations, some are run through a bottom-up decision-making model and some create open source possibilities for a range of networks and communities. Artist organisations may position themselves at the intersection of institutional realms such as art, academia and political activism. As a result, their work may be entwined with contradictory or ambiguous institutional claims. While artist organisations vary in size, scope, aims and structure, they all posit alternative means of instituting and ways of reimagining political engagement. We might see them as emerging from a societal need to align precarious phenomena – such as grassroots engagement, civic platforms and social movements – with more established cultural institutions like theatres and their infrastructures. It is important to remain vigilant about critical distinctions between organisations and institutions and to consider the points raised by the human geographer Angela Last, who asks “why we call such efforts ‘institutions’. Would ‘social movement’, ‘informal organisation’ or ‘civic experiment’ not do? What do institutions do differently, and what kind of solidarities can they facilitate or sustain?” (Last 2017, 101). One possible response to these questions, drawing on neo-institutional theory, is that organisations are controlled or managed, can take the form of a corporate business and might in some cases aim solely for their own financial benefit; while institutions, on the other hand, are self-sustaining and operate on a more abstract level, defining frames and rules for our everyday social actions, outliving individual artists and functioning as an established public service (DiMaggio and Powell 1991). Last explains that the term “institution” tends to elicit either conditional appreciation or complete aversion. The aversion is usually triggered by some form of exposure to institutional violence through bureaucracy or enforcement of undesirable norms; while a conditional appreciation usually stems from a general welcoming of institutional safety nets combined with an awareness of their potentially oppressive downsides. (Last 2017, 99–100) She compares this to the relationship between people and the state, as something that is both loathed and desired. In an attempt to counteract the state’s withdrawal of institutional support for social housing, education and healthcare, many people across Europe and beyond have set up alternative institutions: currencies and banks, ecological art laboratories, schools and even fictional states (as in the case of Neue Slowenische Kunst). We could also

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include here informal refugee camps such as the Calais Jungle. Some alternatives are tolerated or welcomed by states and may even receive state funding, whereas others are seen as subversive and threatening to the state, especially when they seek to replace existing forms of governance with completely new systems.

Universities as artistic projects and alternate institutions In this section, I introduce two cases in which directors and theatre collectives, working on the fringe of performing arts, turn to institutions to meaningfully and effectively engage with refugee issues and to show solidarity with refugees’ limbo existence. The examples are McDonald’s Radio University by Akira Takayama, and The Silent University – a project initiated by Impulse Theater Festival in conjunction with other cultural institutions. In 2017, the Japanese theatre director Akira Takayama started a series of theatrical projects under the umbrella McDonald’s Radio University, in collaboration with the publicly funded Künstlerhaus Mousonturm fringe theatre in Frankfurt, Germany (Marschall 2020). The series ran from 2 to 16 March and took place in seven McDonald’s restaurants across Frankfurt. Takayama’s aimed to draw theatre-goers and other members of the predominantly white cultural elite into these places, which function not only as affordable fastfood restaurants but also as shelters. McDonald’s has, according to Takayama, “accepted the most immigrants and refugees in Europe, both as workers and customers, and it has created a model of integration by doing so” (Takayama 2017). On site, anybody could listen to two or three academic lectures per day, free of charge, by ordering them alongside their food at the counters. A portable radio and headphones were provided on a tray, enabling each audience member to listen and learn in silence. The lectures were given in real time from somewhere within the McDonald’s, in English or German, by fifteen professors in the fields of music, philosophy, architecture, urban design, biology, literature, international relations, management, sports science, journalism, media studies and accounting; and, as the lectures reveal, all of the professors are also refugees who have f led war, danger and persecution from countries including Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Eritrea and Iran. Although I will emphasise that when the performance takes place is vital to its meaning and politics, the question of site remains important, as it is rooted in our “desire for located belonging” (Mackey and Whybrow 2007, 6). In a recent interview about the controversial fast food chain and his reasoning for siting the work here, Takayama ref lects: In McDonald’s in Frankfurt, I see a diversity of people, multi-racial, multi-lingual, differently marked by outward appearances. […] Many cultural institutions today proclaim to be open to diverse audiences, but

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actually, it is at McDonald’s where I see this diversity actualised. […] The typical Leftist theatre-going audiences critique global franchises like McDonald’s, but I wanted to bring them exactly to this place to help them realise that they are being part of this social reality. (Takayama 2020) Takayama reiterates here what Baz Kershaw has argued twenty years ago in relation to the potentials and limits of site-specific theatre works, that “performances in theatre buildings are deeply embedded in a theatre as disciplinary system” (Kershaw 1999, 31). Takayama’s long-term collaboration with Mousonturm does not, in a strict sense, succeed completely to work outside this very disciplinary system, although the Mousonturm presents a very f lexible range of performance styles and aesthetic experiments of freelance collectives, but is nonetheless embedded in the state-funded German theatre system. Over the last decades, we have indeed seen a plethora of diverse sitespecific, site-responsive and promenade theatre works that immerse spectators in the respective place and bring new layers of meaning to them and reconfigure the sites themselves. What happens for audiences and lecturers in the McDonald’s restaurants is that they paradoxically become positioned both inside and outside the theatre, inside and outside the urban social fabric. The headphone lectures allow for a listening-in and at the same time a looking on, imposed on other customers and workers in the restaurant, almost as if they were shamelessly exhibited. However, technologies of listening via MP3 player create a certain distance from the place, and thus also risk the sense of indifference and the loss of a shared sociality. This prompts the question whether “the isolation of the audience member lead to greater or lesser engagement, or greater or lesser agency?” (Pine, Casserly, and Lane 2020, 25). Clearly, the migrant dramaturgy of McDonald’s Radio University shifts the prevalent focus away from the audience’s agency and onto the possible empowerment of the lecturer and her invisible, but not inaudible, highly complex labour. The lectures thus offer the potential to deconstruct the everyday paradox of invisibility and hypervisibility (Gilbert and Lo 2009, 189) of othered and often, racialised labouring bodies under white gazes, which must unlearn projecting victimhood onto the other. This “silent but committed” (Gilbert and Lo 2009, 28) listening to complex lectures opens up the potential for audiences to “implicate ourselves in this picture” (Salverson 2001, 122), rather than consume a theatrical construction of a place, where so much converges. McDonald’s is often seen as one of the symbols of American imperialism and globalisation, but it also presents a place of physical refuge, a place of low-wage labour for many migrants, a business franchise run more often than not by second-generation migrants in Germany, a place of family gatherings and celebrations, and also a place inscribed into a classicist and extractivist global food industry.

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The project in Frankfurt is part of a larger McDonald’s Radio University scheme: in autumn 2018, the project was transformed into an organisation seeking to employ and include people culturally, financially and economically, regardless of their citizenship status. Between February and April 2018, Takayama and the Mousonturm invited the wider public to join them in planning the organisation’s founding process at so-called business meetings, held at the Social Impact Lab Frankfurt entrepreneurship hub. Together, they investigated possible alternative currencies, among other issues. In collaboration with the architect Keigo Kobayashi, Takayama plans for this organisation to become a social enterprise over the next three years, which would make it possible to open various McDonald’s Radio University locations across European cities along the Balkan route that many refugees follow. A similarly striking example of an alter-institutional university and artistic project which intervenes in the societal conditions of refugees is The Silent University. This is a knowledge exchange platform founded in 2012 by Ahmet Őğüt, with branches in Jordan, Greece, Germany and beyond. It is led by refugees, asylum seekers and migrants who had a professional academic career in their home countries but are now unable to work in their academic field for various reasons related to their legal status. The platform develops teaching programmes, events and resources and undertakes research on the theme of refugee-ness and the experience of going through the asylum process. Like McDonald’s Radio University, The Silent University uses alternative currencies for the benefit of students and the refugee academics alike. In both its name and its emphasis upon silence, The Silent University links back to my previous discussion of the politics of listening in the context of forced displacement. The name of this alter-institutional model challenges the notion of silence as a passive mode of reception, rather than a powerful and potentially harmful practice. By proposing an alter-institutional model that is outside of the existing higher education sphere, and not subject to asylum law and other bureaucratic or juridical obstacles faced by refugees, McDonald’s Radio University much like The Silent University counters the practice of silencing people who go through the asylum process and exposes the systemic failure to safeguard their political agency, skills and knowledge.

Spaces of mutual learning Artistic interventions such as McDonald’s Radio University draw on representational regimes of existing universities and develop alternative structures to decolonise their curricula, pedagogies and commitment to diversity. Lütticken identifies similar emerging artist organisations as part an educational turn, developing in response to the presumed crisis in higher education. He lists cutbacks in UK and US humanities programmes, the ramping up of tuition fees and the neoliberalisation of universities (Lütticken 2015, 6). There is a plethora of writing, blog articles, peer-reviewed papers, edited volumes and social media debates covering this presumed crisis in the

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humanities. Scholars like Ester Conesa, for example, emphasise the “rewards and pleasures in the daily lives of faculty and researchers” (Conesa 2018) but are wary of the managerial values that arguably stem from austerity politics in times of crisis, the competitive practices that urge academics to obtain more external funding and private resources, and the teaching load in temporary, low-income, part-time contracts that change academics’ experiences and trajectories. Conesa also points to quantitative evaluation systems with objective indicators that count academic output per defined unit of time, narrow temporal regimes that accelerate working rhythms and the dismantling of labour rights in different European countries (Conesa 2018). However, scholars have also acknowledged their own complicity in reproducing such value systems, and in response some have explored new ways to confront the presumed logic of austerity. To give some examples, Rosalind Gill, Eleonora Belfiore and Anna Rosser, and Mountz et al. from the Slow Scholarship movement have advocated a feminist ethics of care to disrupt the neoliberal university, find solidarity across institutions and revalue shared responsibilities at the institutional level of academia (Belfiore and Upchurch 2013; Mountz et al. 2015; Solga 2019). What these debates demand is a repositioning towards the question of what kind of research model we want and for whom. Lütticken argues that artist organisations such as McDonald’s Radio University, which create processes of educational co-creation (and not least offer participants a safe and warm space), are ultimately a “response to the separation between education and the residually common world of sensate life” (Lütticken 2015, 6). Furthermore, “when the various alter-academies and universities convene, the aim is of course to provide ‘access to information’, but more particularly to materialise and enact information through the participants’ embodied experience and skills” (Lütticken 2015, 19). Perhaps alliances with meticulous solution-driven designers (be they accountants, architects, coders or lawyers) could be part of a broader response to the question of how the arts and public theatre as an institution react to the presumed need for new forms of political engagement. Alter-institutional models can constitute places of mutual learning about another’s perspectives and needs and give a sense of individual and collective power vis-à-vis the state. They render visible the struggle that surrounds the emergence of any form of institution. With this, they also raise questions about possibilities for experimentation within established institutions. (Last 2017, 102) Indeed, these alter-institutional models expose wider systemic failures to understand stateless refugees’ capacity to be f lexible, take risks and manoeuvre through different temporal and spatial constraints. Crucially, both models structurally support refugees in their everyday experience of limbo, liminality and deferral.

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Theatre makers such as Takayama and cultural workers like Őğüt envision new, alternative forms of organisation and institutions, while f leeting (music) theatre performances such as RECHT stay within the realm of instituted theatre. Both approaches express a desire for sustainability, solidarity and resilience, notwithstanding their different performative explorations of change, rupture and subversion. Both seek to investigate global justice and human rights, despite their different devices, audiences and impact. Rethinking the relations between theatre as public art institution, politics and law, this chapter is inspired by the approach of Takayama and Őğüt (among others): theatre makers, performance artists and cultural workers who have formed alliances with political parties, activist groups and social movements. Together they prefigure a new way of doing politics: they propose a mode of radical agonism and a new political togetherness, but they also raise a host of ethical and legal issues concerning equality, access, representation and human rights. As with many artistic interventions and theatre projects, these approaches engage with problematic paternalistic structures and issues around how to give a voice to the other.

Conclusion While the performance of RECHT foregrounds the question of how to create a better and more equal global justice system, I started this chapter by criticising the organisers’ decision to only invite instituted experts (critical legal scholars, lawyers and NGO workers) to participate in the discussions. A counter artistic practice manifests in building new and different institutions, which respond directly to forced displacement and institutional violence in the perilous nexus between asylum, migration and human rights. The future can be envisioned as a time of justice, democracy and a new world order, but it always demands a response in the present (Bayly 2013, 176). Recognising this, the artist organisation as alter-institutional model provides a structure that confounds the idea of a beginning, middle and end, which characterises temporally limited projects; it aims to sustain life. As I have shown, emerging artist organisations can be opposed to the transnationally dominant form of project-based work in the arts. Such organisations lack a definitive endpoint or singular objective, instead continually envisioning a better socio-political future. With regard to the issues I have focused on – statelessness, refugees and forced displacement – artist organisations such as McDonald’s Radio University hold the potential to durably engage creative ways of imagining a shared future, and in doing so, they intervene in the “experience of being disconnected from temporal rhythms of ordinary life” (Ramsay 2018, 18). A connective thinking across aesthetics and institutional transformation allows us to think through institutions’ material and immaterial relations, racial make-up and colonial logics. This lens is important for arts and humanities scholarship that investigates institutional violence against refugees,

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asylum seekers and stateless peoples. Because such a critical analysis demands the negotiation of cultural complicity, this approach can explore the problem of institutions’ non-performative commitment, which I discussed in relation to Sara Ahmed’s work on diversity. This chapter introduces a new perspective to my discussions and analyses of the Immigrant Movement International, the Centre for Political Beauty, Monica Ross’s and Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s politics of listening. This investigation has moved from refugees’ perilous border crossings, the ethics of border management and the questionable legal procedures imposed in the asylum process, towards the question of statelessness. Through rethinking statelessness with the institutional aesthetics in this chapter, I have foregrounded internally displaced people(s) and the powerful frames of recognition that determine who is granted political agency with international scope and inf luence in the first place and thus who has access to concrete legislation and a voice within political and rights discourse.

References Ahmed, Sara, “How Not to Do Things With Words”, Wagadu 16 (2016): 1–10. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3093652 Ahmed, Sara, “The Nonperformativity of Antiracism”, Meridians 7.1 (2006): 104– 126. www.jstor.org/stable/40338719 Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcout Brace Jovanovich (1986). Argyropoulou, Gigi, and Hypatia Vourloumis, “Settings and Steppings”, Performance Research 20.4 (2015): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2015.1071031 Azoulay, Ariella, “What Are Human Rights?”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35.1 (2015): 8–20. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-2876056 Balme, Christopher, “Theatrical Institutions in Motion: Developing Theatre in the Postcolonial Era”, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 31.2 (2017): 125–140. https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2017.0006 Balme, Christopher, The Theatrical Public Sphere, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2014). Bayly, Simon, “The End of the Project: Futurity in the Culture of Catastrophe”, Angelaki 18.2 (2013): 161–177. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2013.804997 Belfiore, Eleonora, and Anna Rosser Upchurch (eds.), Humanities in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Utility and Markets, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2013). Bishop, Claire, “Panel Discussion”, Verksted 7: Art of Welfare, Oslo: Office for Contemporary Art Norway (2006), 155–132. Brun, Catherine, “Dwelling in the Temporary”, Cultural Studies 30.3 (2016): 421–440. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2015.1113633 Bryan-Wilson, Julie, “A Curriculum for Institutional Critique, or the Professionalization of Conceptual Art”, in: Jonas Ekeberg (ed.), Verksted 1: New Institutionalism, Oslo: Office for Contemporary Art Norway (2003), 89–109. Castañeda, Heide, and Seth M. Holmes, “Representing the ‘European Refugee Crisis’ in Germany and Beyond: Deservingness and Difference, Life and Death”, American Ethnologist 43 (2016): 5–6. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12259

Human rights and institutional imagination  141 Conesa, Ester, “How Are Academic Lives Sustained? Gender and the Ethics of Care in the Neoliberal Accelerated Academy”, LSE Impact Blog (27 March 2018), http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2018/03/27/how-are-academic­ lives-sustained-gender-and-the-ethics-of-care-in-the-neoliberal-acceleratedacademy/ (accessed 12 April 2018). Coumans, Anke, and Bibi Straatman, “Ref lections on Artist Organisations International”, Open! (2015), http://www.onlineopen.org/ref lections-on-artistorganisations-international (accessed 3 Oct 2018). Cox, Emma, and Marilena Zaroulia, “Mare Nostrum, Or On Water Matters”, Performance Research 21.2 (2016): 141–149. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2016.11 75724 DiMaggio, Paul, and Walter W. Powell (eds.), The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press (1991). Feiss, Ellen, “Autonomy for a ‘New World’?”, Radical Philosophy 189 ( Jan/Feb2015), https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/news/autonomy-for-a-new-world (accessed 3 Oct 2018). Fraser, Andrea, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique”, Artforum 44.1 (2005): 100–106. Fraser, Andrea, “Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk”, October 57 (1991): 104–122. Gielen, Pascal (ed.), “Institutional Imagination: Instituting Contemporary Art Minus the Contemporary”, in: Institutional Attitudes: Instituting Art in a Flat World, Amsterdam: Valiz (2013), 11–34. Gilbert, Helen, and Jacqueline Lo, Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2009). Griffiths, Melanie B.E., “Out of Time: The Temporal Uncertainties of Refused Asylum Seekers and Immigration Detainees”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40.12 (2014): 1991–2009. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2014.907737 Gronlund, Melissa, “Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser”, Frieze 94 https://frieze.com/article/museum-highlights-writings-andrea-fraser (2005), (accessed 11 April 2018). Jackson, Shannon, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, London: Routledge (2011). Kallius, Minna Annastiina, Daniel Monterescu, and Prem Kumar Rajaram, “Immobilizing Mobility: Border Ethnography, Illiberal Democracy, and the Politics of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Hungary”, American Ethnologist 43.1 (2016): 25–37. https:// doi.org/10.1111/amet.12260 Kershaw, Baz, The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard, London/ New York: Routledge (1999). Klug, Francesca, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights at 70: Our Government Might Not Organise a Party, But the Rest of Us Should”, LSE Politics and Policy Blog (2018), http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/udhr-70/?utm_ content=bufferb8020&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_ campaign=buffer (accessed 11 April 2018). Last, Angela, “Experimenting with Institutions”, Soundings 64 (2017): 99–104. muse. jhu.edu/article/646737 Linsley, Johanna, “Dreams for an Institution”, Live Art Development Agency (2013), http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/uploads/documents/Dreams_for_an_institution_ SRG.pdf (accessed 11 April 2018).

142  Human rights and institutional imagination Linsley, Johanna, “On License I–III (2016–18) by Tamara Al-Marshouk”, Something Other (6 Feb 2018), https://somethingother.blog/2018/02/06/license-iiii-2016-18/ (accessed 11 April 2018). Lütticken, Sven, “Social Media: Practices of (In)Visibility in Contemporary Art”, Afterall 40 (2015): 4–19. Mackey, Sally, and Nicolas Whybrow, “Taking Place: Some Ref lections on Site, Performance and Community”, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 12.1 (2007): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569780601094785 Marschall, Anika, “What Can Theatre Do about the Refugee Crisis? Enacting Commitment and Navigating Complicity in Performative Interventions”, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 23.2 (2018): 148– 116. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2018.1438180 Marschall, Anika, “Between Tokyo and Frankfurt: Akira Takayama’s ‘theatre 2.0’, migratory encounters and urban solidarity in the contemporary city”, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 26.2 (2020): 205– 233. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2020.1838892 Mountz, Alison, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins Trina Hamilton and Winifred Curran, “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University”, ACME International Journal for Critical Geographies 14.4 (2015): 1235–1259. https://acmejournal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058 Nyers, Peter, Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency, New York: Routledge (2006). Parekh, Serena, Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement, New York/London: Routledge (2017). Phipps, Alison, “Research for CULT Committee: Why Cultural Work with Refugees”, European Parliament, Policy Department for Structural Cohesion Policies (2017), https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/IDAN/2017/602004/ IPOL_IDA(2017)602004_EN.pdf (accessed 26 April 2021). Pine, Emilie, Maeve Casserly, and Tom Lane, “Walks of Experience: Sitespecific Performance Walks, Active Listening and Uncomfortable Witnessing”, Theatre Research International 45.1 (2020): 22–36. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0307883319000567 Ramsay, Georgina, Impossible Refuge: The Control and Constraint of Refugee Futures, London: Routledge (2018). Salverson, Julie, “Change on Whose Terms? Testimony and an Erotics of Injury”, Theater 31.3 (2001): 119–125. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/34187 Savage, Karen, and Dominic Symonds, Economies of Collaboration in Performance: More than the Sum of the Parts, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2018). Seidl, Hannes, and Daniel Kötter. RECHT. Ökonomien des Handelns 2. Performance, Mousonturm Frankfurt am Main (24 Jan 2015). Sheik, Simon, “Notes on Institutional Critique”, Transversal 1 (2006), http://eipcp. net/transversal/0106/sheikh/en (accessed 11 April 2018). Solga, Kim (ed.), “Theatre & Performance, Crisis & Survival”, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 24.3 (2019): 251–256. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2019.1619451

Human rights and institutional imagination  143 Staal, Jonas, Florian Malzacher, Sarrota Hunn, “Artist Organisations International: An Interview with Florian Malzacher and Jonas Staal”, Temporary (12 Oct 2015), http://temporaryartreview.com/artist-organisations-international-an-interview­ with-f lorian-malzacher-and-jonas-staal/ (accessed 11 April 2018). Takayama, Akira, “Dramaturgical Perspectives #3 Strategies of Redistribution”, Mousonturm Frankfurt (2020), https://youtu.be/FDuFswVytZs (accessed 9 June 2020). Takayama, Akira, and Chiaki Soma, “European Thinkbelt/McDonald’s Radio University”, Art It (2 June 2017), http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_ed_news_e/ uZ4q2FG6tUif bwMnzXgd/ (accessed 16 April 2018). Warner, Michael, Publics and Counterpublics, New York: Zone Books (2002).

6

New World Summit Envisioning statelessness

Becoming f luent in each other’s struggles This chapter puts centre stage the New World Summit, an artistic intervention which tackles the perilousness and violence of statelessness. One of the UNHCR’s goals is to end statelessness by the year 2024. Stateless people are not legally recognised as national citizens by any state, but their rights are protected under the UDHR, including their right to a nationality. It is important to note that many stateless persons remain within their home country’s territory as internally displaced people. The New World Summit is an artist-led organisation which facilitates a migratory, mobile platform for stateless peoples to represent themselves politically. The organisation presents a durable means of assembly in different locations across the world, a means for statelessness people and political movements that are not recognised by the United Nations to participate in political life. This chapter discusses the New World Summit’s transformative potential and juxtaposes its assemblies’ temporal, f leeting form of performative engagement with its permanent institutional character. The New World Summit removes statelessness from notions of individual victimhood and discourses of hospitality and saviourism and instead demonstrates how the arts are a necessary driver for transnational solidarity and new political alliances across intersectional difference, volatile asylum politics and perilous border crossings. In turning towards institutional critique and transforming institutions, artists have not decolonised or abolished institutions but they have given way to the question of institutional imagination. Artists who create and build alternative institutional models embody a response to the question “how are we to reinvent politics?”, rather than asking “how are we to face a political problem?” (Last 2017, 102). The crucial difference in these questions highlights the problem customary politics in contemporary Global Northern democracies have in excluding certain people and groups from participation. However, the question of reinventing politics should not simply foreground forms of temporary interruption, which aesthetic concepts and art activist practices are often seen to underpin in the arts and humanities. Reinventing politics means to imagine and rebuild sustainable, liberatory and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003110293-7

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anti-oppressive forms of de-occupying land and political organisation. The work of imagination is crucial here: to strive towards becoming “f luent” in each other’s stories and struggles (Alexander 2002, 91) and to make freedom a possibility that is particular and felt, rather than something generic (Lorde 1984, 36). This institutional reinvention of politics demands a negotiation between critique, subversion and liberation, initially leaving dysfunctional state institutions intact while modelling anti-oppressive counter-practices. Alterinstitutional models such as the New World Summit navigate present complicities or potential integration into the current political system through funding or adopting methods already in place. The human geographer Angela Last suggests that “their potential for reinvention may come from finding alternative ways of negotiating the tension between the desire for security and the desire for greater agency” (Last 2017, 103). The New World Summit is a deeply unsettling artistic intervention: while being situated in white-dominated art institutions and discourses, it also engages with people’s everyday political struggles in decolonisation, in their armed conf lict over land, resources and self-determination, and their access to and use of rights. Crucially, there are “parts of the decolonization project that are not easily absorbed by human rights or civil rights based approaches to educational equity” (Tuck and Yang 2012, 3). It is important to note here the dangers of enclosure, of “dressing up in the language of decolonization” and recentering of whiteness in the artistic intervention as well as in my analysis (Tuck and Yang 2012, 3). With the title “New World Summit”, I associate a narrative of white innocence and the trope of “discovering” “new worlds”, which has been delinked from the colonial extraction and violent appropriation of land. “New World” connects to the Western and modernist idea of “newness” and language of progress, which has long tended to erase modernity’s violent entanglement with colonialism and coloniality (Quijano 2000, 543). Despite my associations with the title “New World Summit”, from my view, being positioned as white, cis-female German citizen with relatively easy structural access to and use of rights, represented in dominant cultural narratives, the New World Summit does not simply perpetuate colonial fantasies and white innocence. Instead, the artistic intervention attends “to what is irreconcilable within settler colonial relations and what is incommensurable between decolonizing project and other social justice projects” (Tuck and Yang 2012, 4). Analysing the North American settler colonial context in particular, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang refer, for example, to “the colonial pathways that are usually describes as ‘immigration’ and how the refugee/immigrant/migrant is invited to be a settler in some scenarios, given the appropriate investments in whiteness, or is made an illegal, criminal presence in other scenarios” (Tuck and Yang 2012, 17). With the New World Summit, working towards solidarity is not merely a frustrating attempt and symbolic gesture; potential political alliances are

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nurtured across very different contexts of decolonisation and social justice work. Underlining the New World Summit assemblies’ unsettling character, we could argue that these forms of engagement are transformative and slowly enact a liberated “elsewhere”, different from single, isolated moments of performative rupture. The cultural theorist Marc James Léger pragmatically suggests that “what is important is not the day of carnivalesque protest, but what happens the morning after, in other words, the more or less enduring characteristics of new social infrastructures and values” (Léger 2015). Artistic critique might serve to show how art, architecture and imagination can structure and shape political ideology, particularly nationalism, racism and fascism. However, there is also a limit to what artistic critique can bring about. Jonas Staal argues that to counteract nationalist and alt-right regimes, “to change society, you have to work on the infrastructural level; you have to translate your ideology into forms that structure social and political life” (Staal 2019). Staal’s argument is situated in his particular context in the Netherlands and Western, European democracies, where racialised state-security apparatuses and policing of nation-state borders eroded conditions of citizenship under the neo-colonial project of the so-called War on Terror in the 2000s. In response, the white Swiss-Dutch cis-male artist Staal initiated the New World Summit project to subvert contemporary Western democracies’ institutions that include both politics and the artworld. In doing so, the New World Summit also deals with the temporal disjuncture of socio-political change; change in political practice is extremely difficult, but it is not impossible to inf luence beyond one’s own individual temporal and geographical boundaries (Last 2017, 103). The New World Summit makes it possible to think of agency as that which “presumes the capability of acting otherwise” (Last 2017, 103) and affirms that the future is not predetermined. What might this notion of agency mean in relation to the envisioning of statelessness and the reimagining of colonial geopolitics? In the previous chapters, I have focused on socially engaged artists working with performance, activism, voice and listening, examining how they have engaged with institutional violence against refugees and wider socio-political issues of migration, asylum and human rights. As we have seen, these artists critique perilous asylum policies and volatile migration politics, and their perpetuation of colonial logics and imperial structures. I have also explained how these artists face the problem of esssentialising refugee identities and voices and the paradox of claiming rights as that which we cannot not want. Without inhabiting cynical anti-state stances, these artistic interventions offer a kind of ambiguous “systemic avowal” (Last 2017, 103). The New World Summit, however, envisions statelessness from a different perspective. In Staal’s words, “our goal is to contribute to the practice of stateless democracy […] The summit should not just be about ‘listening’ to alternatives. It’s about making worlds. Many worlds” (Staal and Bailey 2015). The artistic intervention facilitates collaboration between autonomous movements and political organisations, which are situated far beyond the regimes of recognition by

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any nation-state. Indeed, the New World Summit uses the arts’ institutional realm to provide a critical platform for political representation to stateless peoples, who are excluded from other transnational democratic platforms such as the UN. This artistic intervention therefore connects to wider systems of political representation, ref lecting a commitment to solidarity and to envisioning statelessness differently. The New World Summit “does not merely represent a people, it produces an ongoing series of imaginaries and performative understandings of what a people is, could, or should be” (Staal 2016, 673).

A critical platform for post-national politics The New World Summit is an artistic intervention and political organisation that has developed a series of so-called worldwide “alternative parliaments” since 2012 (Staal 2013, 251). These parliaments have hosted a number of autonomous groups, stateless people and representatives of blacklisted political organisations (blacklisted here means placed on so-called international terrorist lists by state governments, with various justifications). Staal elaborates on the opacity of these lists: The “terrorist lists” comprise organizations that are internationally considered to be state threats. In the European Union, a secret committee, the so-called “Clearing House”, draws up the EU terrorist list. The Clearing House meets bi-annually, in secret and there are no public proceedings of the way decisions are made for the listing of political organizations. One could rightfully say that even by its own standards, the committee that oversees placing organizations “outside” of democratism, is itself organized in a fundamentally undemocratic manner. The consequences for the listed organizations and people who are in contact with them include a block on all bank accounts and an international travel ban. (Staal 2013, 251) The New World Summit seeks to circumvent these anti-terrorist lists by operating as a “nomadic parliament”, meaning the assemblies do not take place at a fixed location; moreover, the organisation does not own any properties and it does not represent “indefinite claims on the right to speak” (Staal 2013, 251). The New World Summit deals with extra-legal policies enforcing ideologically questionable border protection, political infrastructures and security apparatuses. Art functions as an exceptional sphere in the juridical frame for the organisation; but more so, art offers a space of “radical ambiguity […] where we can question and redefine what representation is” (Staal and Bailey 2015). Staal argues that artists are uniquely positioned to diagnose and respond to the inadequacies of politics, to guide discourse when and where politics fails.

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Writing in the style of a manifesto, Staal explains the pedagogy of the New World Summit: I believe that the first act necessary to free art from the cultural industry of democratism that is keeping it hostage is to rearticulate the political context in which we want art to be operational. This process of re-articulation is not only discursive, but will have to take place through the practice of art. Art in defence of fundamental democracy thus means that we demand art to align with the project of progressive, emancipatory politics, but also that art will have to shape this project once again. For progressive art is not simply a product of politics, but a political force in itself. (Staal 2013, 252) I understand Staal’s use of the term “democratism” as follows: how contemporary Western democracies, democratic nation-states are perpetuating historic colonial and extractivist logics, structures and ideologies through their coupling with the military-industrial complex and governing based on economic interests of few in power. The New World Summit assemblies are legally possible because the participating groups are blacklisted in some regions of the world but not in others. Staal has highlighted how Western states and political parties use the term “democracy” to legitimise human rights violations or to disregard human rights by colluding with global companies and deploying the military-industrial complex. More specifically, I would argue that the New World Summit confronts Western cultural institutions with their structural implication in excluding and marginalising different peoples across geopolitical and socio-cultural realities. On the one hand, the New World Summit provides a material space for people(s) excluded from democracy, functioning as an alternative to the UN on a post-national scale. On the other hand, it sits within the larger institutional frame of the arts, and the space provided could also be framed as a mere symbolic, theatrical space. The New World Summit is driven by a creative imagination that makes it possible “to jump into the gap between legality and illegality, creativity and criminality” (Gielen 2017, 127) According to Pascal Gielen, in such works it is precisely this “imaginary potency” that creates the possibility to go further than debates about politics and civil activism. Not only are artists capable of presenting an imagined world, their skills allow them to make us also actually experience that world. Perhaps this is where their extra political potency lies. (Gielen 2017, 127) Staal raises a plethora of ethical and politico-legal issues, by pointing out the ideological continuitiy between democracy and totalitarianism; he presents

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a radical critique of presumed material equality in political participation and human rights as enshrined in national political systems. Thus, Staal’s critique and artistic intervention with the New World Summit raises the following questions: In what ways do the New World Summit assemblies make institutional transformations in politics possible? What is the role of imagination, affect and bodily interdependency in relation to the more formal and curated nature of the assembly encounters? As the New World Summit, we attempt to explore at what level art can serve as a tool to bypass these anti-terrorist laws. […] we make maximum use of the juridical exceptional role of art: the fact that art, even on a constitutional level, is never simply present, it is always simultaneously questioning the conditions of this presence. This radical ambiguity creates the space where we believe the promise of progressive politics will have to take shape. (Staal 2013, 251) Staal claims that the art space in which the New World Summit takes place has an a priori “radical ambiguity”, perhaps between notions of what is “real” and what is “fictitious”, what is to be judged under the corpus of the law. However, the ambiguity of art spaces is not always a given: It is in f lux and depends on the power dynamics inherent in the respective art space and its respective historic context, as well as the relationality between artists, participants and audiences.

Alternative parliaments migrating from Berlin to Rojava The documentation and video footage of the New World Summit assemblies show that the presentations and discussions, while passionate and sometimes subtly dogmatic, are reasoned and articular clear political aims, which are perhaps fuelled by a sombre anger. The New World Summit arguably performs political agency as “the ability to affect sociocultural dynamics by strategically engaging with a given set of circumstances, such as unequal social power relations or deep-structural violations of human rights”. Participants’ strategies, such as the “contestation of received cultural tropes” and “switching to a lingua franca in a diverse group to avoid the excluding practice of conversing in a language not spoken by all, or regarded by some as oppressive” (Kruger 2017, 3), can contribute to reconsidering socio-cultural norms, contesting cultural narratives, and, ultimately, having the capacity to self-determine. Aesthetically, the spaces of these different parliaments are circular and minimalist theatres-in-the-round, chairs have been exchanged for benches, light is equally cast on speakers and listeners alike and the speakers talk from within the rows of participants and listeners. This use of space counters the spatial configuration of many white-dominated political spaces, such as courtrooms or nation-state parliaments or national theatres, where presenters

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tend to be looked at, represented and exposed as single, individual speakers (Marschall and Simke 2022, 154). From an outsider perspective such as myself, it remains in question whether those invited to speak at [the New World Summit] necessarily represent the interests of the people they purport to, or if Staal’s formal and aesthetic modes are appropriate for certain alternative or indigenous political practices with which it attempts to engage. (Sivanesan 2018) The aesthetics of the space change from site to site and context to context. The “form in which people assemble, and the visual conditions and imaginaries we are surrounded by or even implicated in during such gatherings, create the possibility of different outcomes and alliances” (Staal and Bailey 2015). The assemblies have been held during art biennales and in spaces such as a black box theatre space at Sophiensæle in Berlin (2012), on the grounds of an old colonial complex and the premises of a former English trading company in Kochi (2013), in the nineteenth-century theatre building of the Royal Flemish Theatre in Brussels (2014), in Dêrik in Rojava where the autonomous government of Rojava (northern Syria) commissioned Staal to build an open-air public parliament surrounded by a people’s park (2015), and in the aula of Utrecht University, where the Dutch state has parliamentary origins (2016). The aesthetics of the spaces have included wooden scaffolding, resembling a construction site including both material and immaterial labour and indexing the pragmatic movability of the parliament. They have included a number of hoisted f lags that represent the participating, blacklisted political organisations and independent movements. The f lags comprise various colours (red, yellow, blue, green, purple and black) and show recurring symbols such as stars, circles, stripes, weapons and symbolic years or numbers, as well as hands making fists or repose gestures with the palms facing upwards, representing openness, nurturing, an offering or promises. The arrangement by colour aesthetically disrupts any easily drawn commonality of these organisations beyond their frozen bank accounts or travel and trade bans. They have included large prints of black and white maps of the specific territory or ideal of statehood for each organisation, which have been created in collaboration with each organisation over the course of one and a half years, as they continue changing lines of their territories and undergo internal conf licts. The maps manifested alternatively drawn borders and redistributed access to land for Uyghurs, Oromo people, Basques, Balochis, Kurds, Eelam Tamils, Scots and Tuareg among others. They have also included large printed pages of Guantánamo Diary by Mahemdou Ould Slahi, who was held without charge in the prison for fourteen years. Slahi wrote this memoir in English, while learning the language during imprisonment. The displayed prints are of the first edition of the book, which was published in 2015 and included the 2,500 redactions of military censors, thus showing in the assembly space

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a visceral quality through the literal blacking out, the obscuring of marginalised narratives. What follows is a lengthy list that shows the variety and scope of all the groups who have participated in the assemblies: National Democratic Front of the Philippines; Kurdish Women’s Movement; Basque Independence Movement; National Liberation Movement of Azawad; Communist Party of the Philippines; New People’s Army, Philippines; Ahwazi-Arab Alliance; Balochistan People’s Party; Republic of Somaliland; Baster People of Rehoboth; Women on Waves; Pirate Party Iceland; Euskal Herria Bildu; World Uyghur Congress; Southern Azerbaijan Alliance; MAKIBAKA; Ogaden National Liberation Front; Women for Independence, Scotland; Tamil Eelam; National Government of the Republic of West Papua; Kurdish National Congress; World Amazigh Congress; Scottish National Party; Feminist Initiative; Democratic Union Party, Rojava; People’s Protection Units; Congress of Nationalities for a Federal Iran; Popular Unity Candidacy, Catalonia; Aboriginal Tent Embassy; Aboriginal Provisional Government; Black Panther Party; Sortu Basque Country; We Are Here; Socialist Party in the Netherlands; Popular Liberation Front of Palestine; Sinn Féin, Ireland; The Foundation of Free Women (Weqfa Jina Azad a Sûrî), Rojava; Barcelona en Comú; Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP); and Frontier Imaginaries. Staal has shed light on the difficulty of building trust with these groups and of determining where the summits take place, what they look like, and what it means to organise them in spaces designated for art (Staal and Bailey 2015). Although the very first summit in Berlin was difficult to organise, Staal has explained that public recognition, support and interest has grown with each successive summit. Today, Staal notes that it is less necessary to reach out to groups; instead, movements and organisations tend to take the initiative and ask the organisers whether they can participate. In his words, “it’s no longer a question of building the network, but dealing with the question of how to work with all these stateless substructures that could benefit from the New World Summit” (Staal and Bailey 2015). The first summit was embedded in the larger institutional framework of the Berlin Biennale. Staal facilitated the assembly as part of his PhD project, seeking to create an event that would test the boundaries of democratic practice, law and ethics. The event aimed to provide a platform for voices, narratives and political ideas that have been excluded from a wider international conversation, challenging notions of state and statelessness. As if to illustrate these practices of exclusion, Staal’s proposal prompted a threat from the German national cultural fund to withdraw funding for the whole Biennale. Through careful negotiations with the funders, and thanks to the solidarity of a committed ally on the Biennale board, Staal convinced the organisers to let the assembly take place. Nonetheless, the episode is telling; it reveals that from its proposal onwards, the project’s agenda was regarded as a serious political threat with a potentially critical impact far beyond the arts realm.

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The third summit was scheduled for early 2013 as part of the first Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kochi, India. Although the New World Summit created a triangular shaped, open air parliament space, the actual assembly did not take place as planned due to state intervention. The Kochi City Police – with approval from State Intelligence and the Home Department – intervened and raided the parliament. The police painted over the political movements’ f lags, and three members of the New World Summit, including Staal, were accused of material support to blacklisted organisations and charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act Section 10 (4). In both these acts of reinforcing the national corpus of the law, albeit across very different contexts, statelessness is seen as a threat to the very paradigm of the post-colonial nation-state itself. While not referring to refugees’ legal categories, the notion of statelessness in the New World Summit engages with post-national efforts to oppose geopolitical violence and prevalent colonial logics. In the New World Summit’s publications, statelessness is described as a political reality for and by the various groups involved; but it is affirmed as a different kind of political model for a democratic society. Although rhetorically indicating a lack – the absence of a state to “administer your identity” (Staal and Bailey 2015) – the New World Summit links statelessness, as it is lived at the everyday level by these groups, to meaningful forms of selfadministration. On this view, statelessness points to a potential taxonomy of collective organisation, alter-institutional models and infrastructure, rather than individuated forms of forced displacement and victimisation. The New World Summit aims not only to organise and set up temporary assemblies around the world but also to contribute to the long-term (re) building of solidarities between stateless peoples and independence movements across their different political contexts and colonial settler histories and modes of oppression: [t]he summit is as much about the right of equal representation of state and non-state actors as it is about a search for what could be an alternative […]. It’s about asserting the right of peoples before that of states, and making visible the radical diversity of political struggle that takes place in our world today. (Staal and Bailey 2015) Over the years, the New World Summit assemblies have grown in size, public outreach and recognition. I would argue that the New World Summit has been transformed from an initial singular temporary assembly event to a structural intervention, which exposes how the theatre and cultural and academic institutions more widely are complicit in larger systemic political practices of exclusion, white-dominated epistemologies and the perpetuation of colonial logics of nation-state politics. By offering a durable platform for post-national political representation and alliance building, the New World Summit demonstrates that artist interventions can be an important driver for

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exposing institutional violence, for imagining racially equitable, liberatory and anti-oppressive organisation. Evidently, power is inherently imbalanced at the New World Summit: the organisers own one or more passports and can smoothly cross international borders, while the invited stateless representatives often exist at the very edge of legal citizenship and national political systems. However, in this context, such status is not presented in terms of victimhood. Despite transit and/or economic embargos and a lack of international recognition, these political organisations do not passively await help from NGOs or the International Monetary Fund. Refusing to be cast as victims, the stateless peoples constitute their own political structures, making use of the New World Summit to forge alliances and coalitions with other invited representatives. Staal has elaborated on his insights from collaborating with the political groups: [T]he role of art within stateless states […] often takes the form of an alternative to the state. […] I didn’t realize this at the beginning of the project, but slowly I began to understand that with the confrontations between existing states and stateless states, you also have confrontations between fundamentally different understandings of cultural practice. Within the existing state, art is depoliticized as a space of “mere representation”. In the context of the stateless state, art sometimes is the only means of representation left, thus deeply politicizing art, and defining it as the very foundation of the state building project. (Staal and Bailey 2015) While the artist here urges a critique of the nation-state, he emphasises that this concept was historically revolutionary, because it made it possible to think of peoples as constructed by something other than ethnic, class-based or religious interests: commonality was not marked by bloodline. Yet Staal is wary of the violence that marks the reality of the nation-state system and he argues that, in the contemporary context, we must return to the question of what actually defines a people. Aside from the New World Summit in Rojava (northern Syria) that takes centre stage in the following, the New World Summit seems to remain located in and funded by the Global North and to remain methodologically rooted in the Western world, using the traditional structures of the democratic parliamentary process.

Berxwedan jiyane! Statelessness and the Kurdish Women’s Movement The New World Summit typically holds assemblies in major European political and artistic centres, but a significant exception was the fifth iteration, which took place in Rojava (northern Syria) in October 2015. This summit marked a shift to theatrical spaces of representation that exist literally, in

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the midst of armed conf lict in northern Syria. Staal and the New World Summit team were invited to Rojava and subsequently were commissioned to conceptualise and construct a new, permanent, multi-purpose parliament for Rojava. In 2012, a decade ago, while fighting the Assad regime and the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq, Kurdish revolutionaries together with Assyrian, Arab and other peoples of the region, declared Rojava autonomous, an independent “stateless democracy”. Stateless democracy refers to a form of government based on local councils, communal economy, gender equality and self-governance. In 2014, the independent people of Rojava published the Charter of the Social Contract, which accounts for the region’s political and legal self-governing rules and submits to the Geneva Conventions. Since then, international political organisations such as Amnesty International have visited the region to survey its political processes of self-administration and infrastructure. Locally referred to as the People’s Parliament of Rojava, the parliament for the stateless democracy was completed and inaugurated in late 2018 in the town of Derîk that lies in one of three cantons of Rojava. The parliament is an open air, dome-like structure with concrete circular benches and a circular concrete lectern in the middle. On the different steel trusses surrounding the dome, we read the Kurdish Women’s Movement principles in the different locally spoken languages of Arabic, Assyrian, Kurdish and Syrian: communalism, democratic confederalism, gender equality, secularism, self-defence and social ecology. The Netherlands-based architect Merve Bedir reads the images of the parliament as follows: At first glance, the steel trusses that form the skeleton of the parliament structure seem foreign to the local context. People are more familiar with adobe, brick and stone in the region. The pavilion appears strong, permanent, durable. Each truss has a concrete base revealed over the f loor level, showing how the structure firmly holds onto the ground. (Bedir 2016, 6) The parliament’s aesthetics feel as if it was permanent and yet “continuously under construction” (Staal quoted in Bedir 2016, 8), or continuously working towards connection and mutual strength, because of the trusses’ skeleton-like shape, which never fully connect and look different from all sides. The open roof structure of the dome is mounted with the Rojava movement’s different f lags and symbols such as green and yellow olive branches, red stars and yellow suns. Surrounding the parliament is a public park with artworks by local artists from the revolution’s movement. Videos of the parliament’s opening show women and men dancing halay, people having their picture taken in front of the parliament, surrounded by rainbow-coloured f lag garlands f luttering in the wind and children running around. The parliament is as much a political space as it is a social and cultural space for film screenings, art workshops, communal celebrations, lectures and discussions.

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While undertaking research for this book in its earlier stages in 2015 and 2016, I witnessed how Kurdish friends who live in the European diaspora experienced trauma in light of the increased violence against their people and in particular Turkish attacks against Kurds. The war in Syria, the already decades long struggle of the Kurdish people, the f light of refugees to Europe from Sub-Saharan countries, and persecution by the Islamic State are among the factors that have shaped the demand for new perspectives on our enmeshed political landscape and all of our everyday political realities. I face my own insufficient means of discussing and representing Rojava through my distanced, Western perspectives and positionalities, which in other scholars’ analyses have previously perpetuated Orientalising narratives (Shahvisi 2021). Different political imaginations – local, national and post-national perspectives alike – have been compelled by both long-standing and emerging political actors such as the Kurdish revolutionary movement. Critical shifts brought forth by these conf licts and consequent migrant movements to Europe cannot but challenge understandings of identity and belonging; they force the reconsideration of categories like nationality and citizenship, and – most significantly in the present context – statelessness. The Kurds are among the world’s largest stateless nation, with around a million Kurds making up the European diaspora (Shahvisi 2021, 1008). One of the most affecting images of the so-called refugee crisis in Europe surely is of the three-year-old Kurdish boy Alan Kurdi lying dead, face-down on the shore near Bodrum, Turkey in September 2015. Triggering a fifteen-fold increase in donations to migrant aid organisations as well as a creating a shift in the Canadian federal election and in European refugee policy, the photograph of the drowned three-year-old Kurdish boy has become iconic for the so-called refugee crisis (Elgot 2015; Mortensen 2017; El-Enany 2016). Read through a critical race lens, the image of the “pale lifeless body was so redolent of a European child” indicates how “whiteness is a condition for European sympathy” (Shahvisi 2021, 1008). Furthermore, it also signals how a majority of Kurdish people have been affected by the refugee crisis. European borders on the one hand provide asylum for Kurds f leeing conf lict or persecution and racist violence committed against them in their ancestral lands, albeit that in the European diaspora they are not spared racial violence and hatred. On the other hand, historic European border imperialism has forged the statelessness of Kurdish identities. Many Kurds inhabit lands along the porous nation-state borders of Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq. Historically, the Kurdish nation fragmented because of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse and the European imperial forces’ Sykes-Picot Agreement. Perpetuating imperial aspirations and state violence, Turkey has long oppressed and negated the existence of a Kurdish minority, enforcing bans of the Kurdish language and cultural expression, as well as the destroying Kurdish settlements (Tejel 2009; Ergil 2000). Syria denied many Kurdish people citizenship, defining them as foreigners by law, denying their access to voting rights, property and the labour market, and making them effectively

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stateless, depriving them of “their national, democratic and human rights” (UNHCR 2009). Women’s political activism in Rojava dates back to the early 1980s, particularly through the visits and education by Abdullah Őcalan, who supported women’s emancipation from the outset of the Kurdish movement. With the establishment of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party PKK in the late 1970s, a new diasporic Kurdish cultural nationalism emerged and gained momentum as a movement, including theatre as a charged space of politicisation (Rostami 2019). An important shift occurred in the Kurdish struggle through the Kurdish Women’s Movement in that the “liberation of women has become the defining method through which social administration is sought” (Dirik 2018, 223). Drawing on Őcalan’s theories, the Kurdish Women’s Movement rejects the nation-state model for Kurdistan because of its inherent patriarchal, national, colonial and centralised power, and instead has been proposed an explicitly anti-nationalist, anti-statist, anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal form of self-governance, independence and freedom. Consequently, Őcalan and the Kurdish Women’s Movement understand statelessness as necessary condition for liberation, rather than a mere state of oppression. This is not to subdue the enormous sacrifices, losses and mourning of the Kurdish people and the many sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters they have lost. In Kobanê in particular, many women died defending the city against attacks by the Islamic State. The Kurdish Women’s Movement and the self-administered people of Rojava emphasise that their resistance and revolutions are not merely about armed conf lict, but about mentality and ideology. The Rojava revolution is a cultural revolution. Since 2012, the Social Contract of Rojava commits to multilingual institutions, freedom of religion and ensuring the equality of Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Arameans, Turkmen, Armenians and Chechens. The Social Contract of Rojava uses quotas to ensure each ethnic and religious group as well as men and women be equally represented in councils. In addition, the people in Rojava have founded new universities with a clear focus on teaching feminisms, using the oppression of women as a starting point to narrate alternative historiographies of minorities and stateless peoples. They have built worker’s cooperatives, neighbourhood councils and assemblies, and they have set up the first film academy in Kurdistan, the Komîna film a Rojava, which has produced stories about the daily struggles, the history and culture of the local people living amidst the Syrian civil war. The collective stimulates local film culture through production, curated screenings, educational workshops and discussions, and they have shown films at Documenta15 in 2022 among other international festivals. “Berxwedan jiyane!” is a Kurdish sentence uttered throughout the New World Summit meaning “resistance is life”, and you might hear it in conversations throughout the Kurdish diaspora. You might also hear “Berxwedan jiyane!” uttered throughout the streets of Rojava. I was told that the journey from Europe to Rojava is difficult. The journey would demand going

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through appeals with the Iraqi Kurdistan government for travel allowance, you might take a f limsy barge across the river Tigris to cross the border to Rojava and arrive in its canton Jazira. It is unlikely that you might get a stamp or visa in your passport, and instead you might receive a piece of paper with your information and date of arrival. The landscape might look something like this: pierced with oil pumps standing still, grass-covered hilly fields, potholed roads, buildings under construction and militant checkpoints, adobe houses with f lat roofs, men sitting in front in plastic chairs and children running around freely. “Resistance is life” does not merely refer to perilous struggle against oppression but also refers to the importance of imagining, striving for and enacting a dignified, good life despite perilous oppressive conditions. It refers to the importance of living well itself, of creating culture and making community as everyday means of resistance. [I]n a stateless condition, when there’s no state to rely on to administer your identity, the practice of art, literature, poetry and music becomes a way of keeping and performing a common memory through specific cultural and symbolic vocabularies. […] Within the existing state, art is depoliticized as a space of “mere representation”. In the context of the stateless state, art sometimes is the only means of representation left, thus deeply politicizing art, and defining it as the very foundation of the state building project. (Staal and Bailey 2015, emphasis in original)

Figure 6.1  Democratic Self-administration of Rojava and Studio Jonas Staal, New World Summit – Rojava. 2015–2018. Courtesy the artists. © Ruben Hamelink.

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Building on this analysis of the New World Summit and how it envisions statelessness, I will turn to human rights and the terms of engagement at stake here: assemblies. How does the form of the assembly, which lies at the heart of this artist interventions, connect to questions of institutional violence raised earlier in this book? How does the assembly as a temporary, embodied and f leeting form of encounter relate to a cultural and socio-political longing for duration, sustainability and performative commitment?

Assembling as human right and counter-hegemonic practice The idea of assembly as counter-political practice evolved out of the feminist practices and the civil rights movements in the twentieth century, and it is a prevalent trope in the political philosophies of many contemporary leftists (Bayly 2015, 44). Assemblies present the gathering of people as both an immaterial event and a way to enact collective direct action – arguably representing a truly democratic form of engagement. While they do not require rehearsal, they need a clear structure and operational rules. The assembly aims to reinvigorate the discourse on what consensus-based decision-making means and how it is performed in public. At times, assemblies build entire infrastructures of social and material existence, including food, shelter, sanitation, education, rituals, celebration and political process. Therefore, they affect both an immaterial symbolic event which gestures towards a different kind of large-scale future polity, and a very material act of living together in public for a certain period of time. In the following section, I will draw on the discussion so far to interrogate the assembly form, because it is the New World Summit’s crucial form of engagement and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly is anchored in the UDHR too. I will discuss the potential for assembling bodies to forge new political and social relations and to visualise the need we have for one another: to explore our co-dependency, both in an ontological sense and in terms of our lived experience across intersectional differences. How can assemblies help us to envision and experiment with more complex systems of organisational culture, beyond the level of the nation-state? In his publications, presentations and practices, Staal has referenced Judith Butler’s Towards a Theory of Performative Assembly numerous times (Staal 2017). Indeed, drawing on philosophy and performance to understand assembly as a form of engagement with politics is key to the New World Summit. Notwithstanding the importance of this artist organisation for thinking through statelessness, problems arise when we unquestioningly celebrate assembly in performance studies. Interestingly but problematically, Butler uses the terms “theater” and “performing” to describe the power of state organisation, in opposition to the more improvised, less “circumscribed” (Butler 2015, 66) character of assembly. In doing so, she questions theatre’s potential to become a space of radical change and lived interdependence.

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In her book, Butler engages with a vast range of political and cultural groups, with a particular focus on the social justice movements of the 2010s: her subjects include Black Lives Matter in the USA; the worldwide Occupy movement; 15-M Movement/Los Indignados in Spain, Catalonia and the Basque Country; the Arab Spring uprisings, stretching from Tunis to Egypt and Syria; the Gezi Park protests in Turkey; the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong; and refugee activism in the form of hunger strikes and building occupations. Common to these examples is the assembling of bodies: people gather at a specific place or coordinate a series of simultaneous gatherings in different places. Staal states that “they enact a political choreography that suggests the articulation of some form of collectivity” (Staal 2017). Butler employs her notion of precarity and vulnerability to think through collective embodiment in street protest. She argues that when people who experience precarity gather in public, they demonstrate to each other as well as to the wider political system that their situation is a shared one, which can be commonly understood. To put it succinctly: “I am already an assembly” (Butler 2015, 68). Although conditions and circumstances differ, precarity generally entails “the falling away of a necessary collective infrastructure of life support” (Staal 2017). In response to their shared experience of precarity, Butler argues, different groups of people can come together as allies. For her, precarity means institutional political violence, conditioned by policies (or the lack thereof ) enforced by the military, security apparatuses, the police, the economy and the wider environment. Precarity can be distinguished from vulnerability, which designates a more general dimension of embodied social interdependence. For Butler, the body – or rather bodies – is the foundation from which we can think through the model of assembly. Butler emphasises the importance of understanding the manifold organisational efforts required to sustain a performing or assembling body: “We cannot talk about a body without knowing what supports that body, and what its relation to that support – or lack of support – might be”, since “the body is less an entity than a living set of relations; the body cannot be fully dissociated from the infrastructural and environmental conditions of its living and acting” (Butler 2015, 65). This is important for a performance studies discourse, where I see a tendency to understand performance to “only to be itself when it is live, spontaneous, unrehearsed and everyday” ( Jackson 2014, 55). This white-dominated perspective fails to acknowledge the manifold materials, preparations, set-ups and other performative forms of everyday survival, resistance, liberating practices and subversion that enable any kind of staged performance in the first place. Furthermore, the creation of affective encounters and immaterial experiences of performative assemblies depends on the physical and material work done by racialised, marginalised and oppressed performing bodies in sweatshops, call centres, technology companies and minimum wage work conditions. Thus, when bodies gather in a public assembly, we can understand the event as an act that exposes the

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state’s negligence, dysfunctionality or lack of infrastructure. Thus, as Staal argues, the assembly “is simultaneously a direct expression of the condition of precarity and a protest against it” (Staal 2017). Assembling bodies claim their rights and demand to be recognised on large-scale political stages, which also raises human-rights-related questions for assembling bodies in purpose-built theatre spaces. For Butler, it is this aspect of protest or resistance that defines assemblies’ performative dimension. People have claimed public spaces as sites of assembly to build coalitions with other collectives and unions, to make and distribute food or to provide libraries, educational programmes and healthcare facilities. Often, the social justice movements that drive such activities do not have a specific political programme or set of demands, but their use of public space in such ways nonetheless suggests some sort of critical agenda. Butler explains that in “the most ideal instances, an alliance begins to enact the social order it seeks to bring about by establishing its own modes of sociability” (Butler 2015, 84). A social movement is itself a social form, and when a social movement calls for a new way of life, a form of liveable life, then it must, at that moment, enact the very principles it seeks to realize. This means that when it works, there is a performative enactment of radical democracy in such movements that alone can articulate what it might mean to lead a good life in the sense of a liveable life. (Butler 2015, 218) Assemblies as forms of engagement remain fragile, temporary and elusive. They usually enact a new political “infrastructure and architecture” (Butler 2015, 127) only for a f leeting, eventual moment, so we should neither romanticise them nor forget the colonial logics and white-dominated discourses of performance studies, which highlight and celebrate the immateriality of labour, affects and voice (Thompson 2017). As Butler’s argument suggests, assemblies may be a valuable means through which people can expose material threats to their systems of life support, often because there is “no other choice left” (Staal 2017). Yet even here it is important to note that those who can gather in such ways themselves possess a relative privilege. Staal also reminds us to consider what must be done when assemblies are over: [o]nce the squares are empty again, this new institutionality needs to be formalized, organized, and enacted under administrative structures of checks and balances that guarantee durable physical and economic security and fidelity to the collectivity that brought it into being in the first place. (Staal 2017)

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For Staal, artistic practice is thus a vessel for social justice movements, which can help us explore what it means to be a political being; art “can help formulate the new campaigns, the new symbols, and the popular poetry needed to bolster the emergence of a radical collective imaginary” (Staal 2017). These practices can help us to devise new infrastructures, such as alternative parliaments, stateless embassies and transnational unions.

Post-colonial critique against romanticising assemblies The political philosopher Nikita Dhawan has challenged the romanticisation of street-based social movements and assemblies in public spaces, although she sees this kind of direct action as meaningful in the way that it puts new actors onto the political stage and creates alternative public spheres. Such events are characterised not by sombre rational discourse but by affective world-making that expresses emotions including anger, outrage and frustration. Agreeing in part with Butler and Staal, Dhawan notes that these actions share the fact that “bodies on the street are vulnerable to state violence, even as they demand accountability from their political representatives” (Dhawan 2015). However, she argues, the celebratory discourse of the 2010s movements (and of direct action more generally) can blind us to the “discontinuity between those who resist and those who cannot” (Dhawan 2015). Dhawan’s analysis of deeply entrenched practices of exclusion asks whether imaginings of radical change can meaningfully transform social and political relations. Contesting conditions of marginalisation, “protest movements in different parts of the world evoke promises of radical political change through shaming powerful states and international institutions into good behavior” (Dhawan 2015). Indeed, social movements and organisations like the New World Summit are founded upon the essential idea that there is an alternative, that another political order is possible. However, it is always necessary to consider who actually can envision this different political future in the first place. Dhawan argues that global protest movements since the 2010s (and Butler’s celebration of them) have ignored naturalised practices of exclusion inherent in the movements themselves. She also argues that their scope and inf luence are overstated in leftist accounts and wider contemporary discourse. What she calls “romantic enthusiasm” (Dhawan 2015) describes a naïve, class-privileged playfulness which situates the affective experience of protesters within a wider politicised collective. However, this collective usually fails to acknowledge its complicity in exploitative working conditions and the subalternisation of marginalised people(s) “that have a tenuous relation to the state” (Dhawan 2015). While it is not my intention to downplay the vulnerability of street protesters, it is nonetheless true that Butler’s focus on precarity tends to reproduce Eurocentric anger at the dismantling of social institutions while disregarding

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the fact that this situation is the norm in the so-called Global South. Moreover, while vulnerability is shared in the wider sense of embodied interdependence, this does not entail the bodily equality. Challenging protesters’ assumed equality, Dhawan reminds us that there are crucial differences between protest movements: she contrasts people who commit suicide in desperate attempts to make their voices heard with European citizens marching on public streets and camping out in squares (Dhawan 2015). I do not argue against assemblies as a temporary embodied encounter with political decision-making processes, which can bring forth many different layers of meaningful affect, political agency and space for representation. However, it is important to question the value of assemblies in countering institutional violence and post-colonial legacies, such as structural discrepancies in wealth and power. Protest movements and assemblies as forms of engagement are, according to Dhawan, “marked by exclusions that are disturbingly overlooked in celebratory discourses about their opposition to the state. The staging of the state as enemy and civil society as agent of salvation can have vicious neo-colonial consequences, particularly for subaltern groups” (Dhawan 2015). Because communication and debate are crucial for assemblies to function, problems arise when looking at preconditioned (dis) advantages of speakers. As Gielen has emphasised regarding assemblies as social movements, class usually determines who has the learned capacities to speak more and to be more convincing (Gielen and Lavaert 2018). Questioning the effect and meaningfulness of the 2010s social protest movements, Dhawan states: [a]gainst the claim that our common vulnerability brings us together, I would advance a counterargument that deep asymmetries of power and wealth cannot be corrected simply by sharing the street or cyberspace for a common cause or facing police violence together. (Dhawan 2015) Here, Spivak’s work on subalternisation is important: as she makes clear, while the work of human rights activists on the ground must be impatient, the work concerned with human rights in the (I add arts and) humanities is slow, as it must be accompanied by “patient and sustained efforts to learn from below” (Spivak 2004, 548). To unlearn the “impulse to monopolize agency in the name of saving the world” (Dhawan 2015) requires patient, continuous intellectual work. Despite the New World Summit’s commitment to work against a colonially inherited world order – including political, humanitarian and jurisdictional institutions which further the condition of statelessness, such as the International Court – Feiss has provocatively stated that the organisation “would certainly not deny its European status as a host” (Feiss 2015). The New World Summit is committed to patient, slow and continuous intellectual work, not least because of its organisational form, which establishes

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a durable platform for representation, solidarity and political negotiation by stateless people(s). Assemblies are at the heart of the organisation. In general, they entail a tacit commitment to shared values as well as communication protocols: for example, the right to speak, and the specific ways in which the speaking procedure is facilitated. The New World Summit presents a series of assemblies with aesthetic, affective and functional dimensions; they are “places of anxiety, hope, aggression, solidarity, anger, envy, reparation, confusion, clarity, decision and inertia, de-dramatized events in which alliances are forged and broken through a single glance or gesture” (Bayly 2015, 48). Assemblies allow a group of people to come together and experience, plan or plot a common story, but they necessarily do so within a particular context. While the assemblies are not ticketed, they are crucially – and perhaps problematically – held in art and theatrical spaces. At the heart of every assembly committed to decolonisation lies the question of who can actually assemble in this specific space at this specific time. The New World Summit’s terms of membership are not transparent, and Staal decides who to invite to speak rather than an electoral process. Nonetheless, the organisation is working to change the socio-political conditions which underlie precarity; it is a response to the need for further transnational solidarities and alternative geopolitics. Ultimately, the New World Summit intervenes in the institutional violence of statelessness and crucially works to enable the continuity of everyday political life for stateless peoples, as well as providing a valuable image of a potential political future.

Hope beyond a dramatic beginning, middle and end Crucially, the New World Summit’s forms of engagement are durational and its way of performing political commitment unfolds in time. Thus, these performative interventions highlight the social realities of performance as a durational process, rather than as a single eruptive event constrained within a limited temporal framework. As Nicolas Bourriaud states, the “role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real” (Bourriaud 2002, 13). The New World Summit therefore not only offers an alternative temporal model of performance but also highlights the racialised, colonial and temporal constraints of crisis, political change, established institutions and participatory engagement. What I have equally argued for the case of the German artist organisation Grandhotel Cosmopolis (Marschall 2018), it is here too, crucial to understand performance’s affective potential as a starting point for political engagement but equally important to see performance in reference to (non-)performative commitment (Ahmed 2006). What impels the New World Summit to endure as artistic intervention and to face the institutionally complex issue of statelessness, I would further suggest, is the “enactive” (Cox 2012, 120–122) doing of hope, rather than frustration, which can bring social realities into being by collectively

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envisioning a different future (Marschall 2018, 161–162). Hope is embedded in the intergenerational knowledge production of the Kurdish Women’s Movement (Westrheim 2008). Hope can move a present moment forward to what might become. Hope compels an affective capacity to imagine better socio-political futures. Hope is embedded a temporal framework which can shape our understanding of the future and can be seen as creative practice: imagining possible futures through building a shared collective capacity to aspire. This capacity to aspire can be built at the New World Summit’s assemblies where, notwithstanding their frailty, “the timelines of individual lives temporarily fall ‘in sync’” (Bayly 2015, 47). Hope manifests in the New World Summit’s engendering of a transnational politics that actively rejects the geopolitical nexus of statelessness and asylum induced by nation-states. The artist organisation refuses to align itself with the perspective of political leaders who insist on the nation-state as a rights-giving framework and often call for a short-term political fix. Hope is central to marginal politics (Coleman and Ferreday 2010, 313) and, as I argue, it is central to the New World Summit’s socio-political commitment. I have argued that what is characteristic of this practising of hope through commitment, and to hope more generally, is that it is both “actual and potential” (Coleman and Ferreday 2010, 313): it encompasses a desire for a better life for all – a cognitive, affective orientation towards the future – and at the same time embeds us materially in the present (Marschall 2018, 162). Placing hope in the present distinguishes it from an anticipated outcome, “an expected success” (Massumi 2002, 211), and helps us to think differently about the temporality of statelessness, refugees and nation-states. It also leads to the question of whether the New World Summit’s hopes for a just, transnational solidarity can be understood not only in terms of the affective, cognitive mode of imagination often sparked by artistic events and performances, but also as an illustration of how hope itself can be effective and rooted in present organised action. Hoping can be understood as a necessary practice for social change which weaves together imagination and stamina, enabling an embodied commitment to “new ways of doing politics” (Haran 2010, 395). Staal explains that his intervention explores the edge of democratic political systems through continuous, durable action: “[t]he paradoxical promise of democracy – freedom and the right to difference for everybody – requires an unrelentingly consistent action, which, first and foremost exposes the fear of freedom when the wafer-thin mask of tolerance and openness falls away” (Staal 2012, 281). What we see with the New World Summit is how such artist organisations respond to politically marked “urgencies” in our increasingly multicultural and transnational societies with a long-term performed commitment that confounds our understanding of political performances and their temporal unfolding. Pragmatically, such interventions dwell and persist at the intersection between art, subversion and political institutions, and they

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create “relational work/life models that insist on other ways of doing culture” (Osten and Choi 2014, 283). As I have argued previously, “emerging artist organisations such as the New World Summit therefore make us rethink how performance’s political efficacy might reside in its potential to encompass multiple temporal rhythms that refrain from a dramatic beginning, middle and end” (Marschall 2018, 163). To account for the political meaning of performance calls for structural analyses of institutional transformation in the field of theatre and performance studies, which can address the slowness of institutional change. In addition, this approach highlights the constraints of our scholarly paradigms, allowing a move from the idea of performance as mere symbolic gesture towards real structural political change. The New World Summit extends well beyond the context of timestamping, documenting and classifying the arrival of refugees and stateless people; it transcends the momentum of politicised crisis in a temporal as well as in a political sense. Due to its duration, sustenance and longevity, the New World Summit is constantly blurring the boundaries between performance art and legal, educational and political institutions. The New World Summit crucially confronts political as well as cultural institutions and critical art analyses with their structural implication in excluding and marginalising stateless peoples across geopolitical and socio-cultural realities. This organisation provides a durable platform to critically and ethically examine international terms of political participation and aims to create more equitable power relations among stateless organisations. Post-colonial critique of leftist discourses that celebrate performative assemblies such as in the New World Summit focus specifically on a colourblind neglect of power dynamics and the material conditions of racialised labour and oppression, which make such assemblies necessary in the first place. With reference to this critique, power can be seen as “connected to the right, capacity and ability to assemble: who is eligible to organise assemblies, participate in them and determine the appropriate mode of participation” (Bayly 2015, 42). Crucially, the New World Summit acknowledges cultural institutions’ complicity in naturalised practices of exclusion, institutional racism and perpetuating colonial violence, particularly regarding the perilous nexus of asylum, migration, statelessness and human rights. Artistic interventions, as in the form of the New World Summit, are an important driver for navigating this complicity and imagining transnational political representation anew. Indeed, the New World Summit has centred the Kurdish Women’s Movement, whose enactment of statelessness reaches far beyond conditions of oppression as bound to colonial and patriarchal logics of the nation-state, beyond notions of individual victimhood or discourses of hospitality and saviourism. Instead, what their practices of stateless democracy foreground are co-dependency, feminist education, self-determination and self-administering in working towards political change and forms of engagement that make transformative alliances across difference possible.

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New World Summit: envisioning statelessness  167 Jackson, Shannon, “The Way We Perform Now”, Dance Research Journal 46.3 (2014): 53–61. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767714000059 Kruger, Runette, “Smooth New World: Agency and Utopia”, Culture, Theory and Critique 58.2 (2017): 261–274. https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2017.1322525 Last, Angela, “Experimenting with Institutions”, Soundings 64 (2017): 99–104. muse. jhu.edu/article/646737 Léger, Marc James, “Beyond Socially Enraged Art”, Open! (2015), http://www. onlineopen.org/beyond-socially-enraged-art (accessed 3 Oct 2018). Lorde, Audre, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press (1984). Marschall, Anika, “What Can Theatre Do about the Refugee Crisis? Enacting Commitment and Navigating Complicity in Performative Interventions”, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 23.2 (2018): 148– 116. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2018.1438180 Marschall, Anika, and Ann-Christine Simke, “Forensic Architecture in the Theatre and the Gallery: A Ref lection on Counterhegemonic Potentials and Pitfalls of Art Institutions”, Theatre Research International 47.2 (2022): 142–159. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0307883322000050 Massumi, Brian, “Navigating Movements”, in: Mary Zournazi (ed.), Hope: New Philosophies for Change, New York: Routledge (2002), 210–242. Mortensen, Mette, “Constructing, Confirming, and Contesting Icons: the Alan Kurdi Imagery Appropriated by #humanitywashedashore, Ai Weiwei, and Charlie Hebdo”, Media, Culture & Society 39.8 (2017): 1142–1161. https://doi. org/10.1177/0163443717725572 Osten, Marion v., and Binna Choi (ed.), “Trans-Local, Post-Disciplinary Organizational Practice”, in: Binna Choi, Maria Lind, Emily Pethick and Nataša PetrešinBachelez (eds.), Cluster: Dialectionary, Berlin: Sternberg Press (2014): 274–283. Quijano, Anibal, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America”, Nepantla: Views from South 1.3 (2000): 533–580. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/23906/ Rostami, Mari R., Kurdish Nationalism on Stage. Performance, Politics and Resistance in Iraq, London: Bloomsbury (2019). Shahvisi, Arianne, “Beyond Orientalism: Exploring the Distinctive Feminism of Democratic Confederalism in Rojava”, Geopolitics 26.4 (2021): 998–1022. https:// doi.org/10.1080.14650045.2018.1554564 Sivanesan, Sumugan, “Escaping the Arts of Governing: Notes on Jonas Staal’s PhD Defense”, Temporary (7 March 2018), http://temporaryartreview.com/ escaping-the-arts-of-governing-notes-on-jonas-staals-phd-defense/ (accessed 3 Oct 2018). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Righting Wrongs”, South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2–3 (2004): 523–581. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-103-2-3523 Staal, Jonas, “About the Political Potential of Contemporary Art”, in: Paul De Bruyne and Pascal Gielen (eds.), Community Art: The Politics of Trespassing, Amsterdam: Valiz (2012), 275–285. Staal, Jonas, “Art after Democratism: The Pedagogy of the New World Summit”, in: Nico Jenkins, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei and Adam Staley Groves (eds.), Pedagogies of Disaster, Brooklyn, NY: Punctum (2013), 247–255. Staal, Jonas, “Assemblism”, e-flux 80 (2017). https://www.e-f lux.com/ journal/80/100465/assemblism/ (accessed 11 April 2018).

168  New World Summit: envisioning statelessness Staal, Jonas, “World-Making as Commitment”, in: Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh (eds.), Former West: Art and the Contemporary after 1989, Cambridge, MA and Utrecht: MIT Press and BAK basis voor actuele kunst (2016): 667–677. Staal, Jonas, and Anna Remesova, “Art is always related to power”, Artportal (24 July 2019), https://artportal.hu/magazin/art-is-always-related-to-power-aninterview-with-jonas-staal/ (accessed 19 August 2020) Staal, Jonas, and Stephanie Bailey, “A New World Summit”, Ibraaz (31 March 2015), https://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/160 (accessed 11 April 2018). Tejel, Jordi, Syria’s Kurds. History, Politics and Society, London: Routledge (2009). Thompson, Marie, “Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies”, Parallax 23.3 (2017), 266–282. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1339967 Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor”, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1.1 (2012): 1–40. United Nations High Commission for Human Rights, “Persecution and Discrimination against Kurdish Citizens in Syria” (2009), http://lib.ohchr.org/HRBodies/ UPR/Documents/session12/SY/KIS-KurdsinSyria-eng.pdf (accessed 15 Aug 2022). Westrheim, Kariane, Education in a Political Context. A Study of Knowledge Processes and Learning Sites in the PKK, PhD Thesis. Bergen: University of Bergen (2008).

We have work to do Commitment to a healing labour

While making the final touches to this book and reconsidering my earlier thinking and research journey which took place between 2014 and early 2019, Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. This, of course, resulted in a vast number of people f leeing the war and seeking refuge in Europe. According to the latest numbers available at the time of writing, over seven million people have left Ukraine and sought protection within European borders (UNHCR 2022a). The UNHCR further reports that this is one of the “fastest growing refugee emergencies in history and the largest since World War II” (UNHCR 2022b). Witness reports, journalists and Black community empowerment organisations have documented the harrowing racisms many Black and racialised people and international students from, for example, Nigeria faced during their attempts to leave Kyiv by train and cross the borders to Hungary and Poland. Whereas white women and children were given priority on trains and buses leaving Ukraine in February and March 2022, Black and racialised people were forced to wait in segregated groups and were violently barred from boarding, despite there being empty seats. In problematic media coverage of the war, reporters and commentators affirmed and “emphasis[ed] the whiteness of the Ukrainians seeking refuge” (Bajaj and Cody 2022). The perpetuated distinction between “deserving” and “undeserving” migrants and the racialisation of the figure of the migrant render “invisible the longstanding histories of empire and colonialism that already connect those migrants, or citizens, with Europe” (Bhambra 2017, 369). I felt appalled and angry at the news, but not surprised, given the perpetuating colonial and racial legacies of who counts as human and deserving of protection. This book’s engagement with migration, asylum and human rights, and the need for structural institutional transformation, if not decolonisation or the abolition of institutions, resonates differently in the face of the Russian war against Ukraine and the consequent discourses of migration and racialisation. Throughout this book, I have asked what is to be done in the face of the so-called European refugee crisis in the 2010s, whether and how to tell the whole truth when caught in the asylum process, and if there is an alternative to existing political representational regimes, which do not recognise

DOI: 10.4324/9781003110293-8

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stateless people(s). The artistic interventions presented in this book produce knowledge of rights, and they imagine and perform different human rights: the right to cross borders unharmed, the right to be mourned and remembered, the right to silence, the right to an audience and to be heard on one’s own terms, the right to statelessness and the right to be recognised and to participate in political life. The artistic interventions in this book, as much as my own journey of learning and unlearning as well as unfolding political realities, are characterised by political urgency and frustration but also hope in the struggle for social justice and the search for alternative imaginations beyond the geopolitical nexus of asylum, migration and human rights. Artistic interventions by Tania Bruguera (Chapter 2), the Centre for Political Beauty (Chapter 3), Monica Ross (Chapter 4) Lawrence Abu Hamdan (Chapter 5), Akira Takayama (Chapter 6), and Jonas Staal and the Kurdish Women’s Movement (Chapter 7) have produced different political realities and have shaped new formations of “we” through “being realistic in an unrealistic manner” (Rau and Wolters 2014, 3). Each intervention’s meaningfulness depends upon the specific cultural and historical context, understandings and approaches to human rights and the postcolonial, political conditions and ethical considerations that underpin it. By pinpointing nodal points at which artistic performance, cultural practice, legal procedures and political decision-making intersect, the presented works demonstrate the need for artists’ affective and embodied knowledge of rights to be taken seriously in the arena of law and politics – for them to effectively become agents of political change, exposing legal shortcomings and institutional violence. Performing human rights should be understood as a critical and embodied doing, notwithstanding the particularities of nation-states’ power and their perilous regulation of asylum, refugee-ness and statelessness. Costas Douzinas argues that human rights lie at the heart of the social imaginary and I contend that to perform human rights means to explore their shortcomings, to envision alternatives and to claim rights that are “not yet” (Douzinas 2000, 380), especially with regard to the role of human rights in contemporary migratory movements. However, I caution against understanding human rights solely through their failures and violation. Instead, doing them – as these artistic interventions do – makes it possible to understand human rights not as juridical object but as “politico-legal performing” (McNeilly 2017, 35); and crucially, this performing cannot be imagined outside of cultural narratives, images and storytelling. I specifically chose not to retell and make use of individual asylum stories and lived experiences of f light and refuge in this book. This position stemmed from my desire to avoid the implication that only some of those on the move have legitimate claims to international protection, while the detainment and exclusion of others are supposedly justified; I do not seek to reproduce categories like “deserving refugee” versus “illegal immigrant” or even pit them against one another. Although refugees’ stories have fed

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into my contextual understanding of the grim reality of forced migration, all of them were carefully shared with me in safe spaces, in an atmosphere of friendship and trust built over time. They demonstrate the storytellers’ creative and political agency. My alliance to these individuals compels me to acknowledge, respect and facilitate their capacity to make use of their stories on their own terms, to survive, to further their personal growth and perhaps their own careers by retelling, framing and analysing them in their own ways on their own terms. As a result, I have also written this book with the hope of raising awareness of the geopolitical violence and perceptual binaries which often risk turning refugees into affective commodities. The refugee and migration studies field has expanded considerably over the last decade, and it is important to acknowledge the important role the arts and humanities plays in researching conditions of asylum, forced displacement and statelessness because of their unique capacity for storytelling, image-making, collaboration and envisioning shared futures. Jeff Crisp, former head of policy development and evaluation at UNHCR, calls for a critical perspective on migration research. The research referenced here is predominantly produced by white institutions and academics in and from the Global North and it is predominantly produced in disciplines that Crisp identifies as policy driven (Crisp 2018, 2). Crisp does suggest other potentially valuable disciplines for the migration research field, which could provide insight into “refugee protection, assistance, and solutions” (Crisp 2018, 2), but he fails to include theatre and performance studies – or, indeed, the arts in general. This book, among many other brilliant studies and artistic interventions in the field, demonstrates that this is an oversight.

Decentering whiteness: commitment to a healing labour In navigating the methodological and epistemological challenges of this research, I was called to political action: to demonstrate, to sign campaigns, to teach and learn new languages, to share resources and time, to feel irritated, defensive, and uncomfortable and to “feel new feelings” (Khanna 2020, 1), to unlearn my white epistemic habits, to develop racial literacy and the capacity to sit with racial discomfort and to committing to a healing labour. In the postcolonial contexts, I live and work in (Scotland, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands), questions of race, histories of empire and colonialism, and the present realities of asylum and forced migration are deeply implicated in how we can imagine shared futures across intersectional differences. The colonial logic and structural whiteness of political and educational institutions in Europe determine how refugees are welcomed and how power is wielded over displaced people. While editing this conclusion in the summer of 2022, one memory of my research process seeps out clearly and demands further ref lection: the memory of my struggle to find meaningful opening sentences in the draft introduction for my PhD thesis (Marschall 2018). I felt the need to draft these

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opening sentences with a necessary positioning. In particular, my teacher Alison Phipps’s poem “My name is Alison, … and I am a recovering racist” (Phipps 2018) strongly resonated with me at the time. I was, and am still finding myself within a transformative, heuristic, and embodied process of learning and unlearning the structural societal advantages and whitedominated knowledge I inherited. An important part of this translates into my research work committing to a healing labour, which means carefully navigating the power dynamics and potential institutional violence that comes with my knowledge production in the academy. Phipps’s poem, her research and activism on asylum and migration have transformed my thinking and being, as well as UN policy (2017). My name is Alison, … and I am a recovering racist But I was born with this addiction because my ancestors were white and the country I am from grew fat in every imperial fight. Money, privilege and power come through the barrel of a gun. That wasn’t just in history it’s still how this is done. The work which calls me loudly towards your skins and eyes and tears is the work which is intention to assuage those birth-right fears. So do not idolize my actions do not praise my words as bold do not look at the donations or the papers that I hold. The thoughts I have of charity are just part of this addiction inherited from a line that is a long and bleached-out fiction. I do not have to worry when my skin is in a room or on a train or in a car or in the immigration tomb. I will be given space and money and more time, because I’m white,

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because my ancestors were slave owners, or slave drivers and right. While you my friends, my kindred will be skinned another way, f layed into diminishments through ever greater punishments and all those cruel admonishments. The only proper meaning of the white man’s burden is that for all my days commitment will be to a healing labour. on my death bed, in my dying I will be a racist too. But its shouldering the burden that will lead to something new not denial of what sticks to every tone, or shade or pore but the making of relationships that brim with something more something giving and forgiving of the shame upon my skin something real and raw and honest that can live with history’s sin. At times our conversation will make our skins dissolve and around us through the laughter a new world may revolve when the tears are all that join us when the skin gives way to bone. And through the pain we’ll love again and call this earth our home. (Phipps 2018, 46–48, italicising in original) Taking inspiration from Phipp’s poem and finding a special calling from her “commitment … to a healing labour” and the necessary positioning, I crafted the following draft for the opening sentences of the PhD: This is a study about contemporary politics and performance. Therefore, it is not vital but necessary to first position myself politically. I am white. I am a European citizen, resident in Scotland. I am female. I am able-bodied. I am f luent in three colonial languages. I am a fully-funded

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Ph.D. student. I am part of the problem. I am complicit with systemic institutional violence. I am a recovering racist. By that, I mean that I am continuously unlearning my privileges in a racialised system and I am committed to undo previously taught white attitudes and beliefs, working toward racial equality and social justice. It is my responsibility to do something about my inherent bias. […] This is not a study about my white guilt, about racism or theatre performances which address this issue. In fact, the artists I am investigating here are aware of their privileged positions and their complicity in colonial legacies. […] With this study I underline the politico-legal importance of artistic interventions invested in the continuous struggle for equality and against the legacy of racist, class-based, gendered privilege. (Marschall 2018) My white, cis-male, German supervisors’ feedback on my opening sentences and the first draft was unanimous: take these sentences out, you should not want to position yourself that way and you should not want this problematic wording to jeopardise the examiners’ critical judgement of your work. I listened to their hesitations and trusted their recommendations; I cut the opening sentences and refrained from explicitly positioning myself in white supremacist culture and the white-dominated field of theatre and performance studies. To me, this memory is telling in that it speaks to the institutional reinforcement of the invisible norm of whiteness, and it speaks to the structural exclusions that are embedded in our discipline and the university as institution (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2014, 93–94; 98–100). This memory continues to demand of me an explicit and critically self-aware positioning in any writing, teaching and engagement with interlocutors. Yet, such positioning and statements are not enough by themselves, as Black and Global Majority colleagues have urged. White colleagues in the British context ought to be held accountable to racial equity action and ought to fundamentally re-examine “the racist values that shape our fields” (Revolution or Nothing 2020). Decolonising knowledge and undoing my habitual white ways of making invisible the norms our research is reproducing are intrinsic parts of untangling the nexus of asylum, migration and human rights. As I have highlighted in Chapter 2, the proliferation of European theatre works and arts and humanities scholarship on refugees, asylum and statelessness should not be seen as a significant shift in and of itself. While negotiating my own inherited privilege, I have continually posed the question “how can I affirm human dignity?” with regard to my research, epistemologies and ethics of encounter. My research journey has led me to articulate and emphasise the urgent need for activism subversive potentials and political action in academia. Clearly, my aim for this book is for it to become part of the academy through

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its adherence to accepted parameters. I use established theory and methods, descriptive and analytical language and formal referencing systems; and embed it within a larger body of academic literature and work. Given my geopolitical focus on Europe, my communicative approach ref lects certain norms of Western culture and largely depends upon my learned knowledge of these conventions. The pressing issue this research raises for future work – as I have indicated at different points throughout this book – is the need to combine activist commitment, accountable actions towards social justice and racial equality within research. If an understanding of human rights entails a critical embodied doing, then future research must consider how this doing is or can be enacted in academia as well. With this book, I have aimed to (co-)produce knowledge of rights that can inform radical social change and underpin progressive strategies of teaching and learning. But what can it do to challenge and restructure the power relations and ideological mechanisms that exist within its own institution? This question refers back to how theatrical expertise has been instituted in the Global North and what specific practices and critical ideas have been and are perpetuated within such networks of institutional expertise and by those holding relative power in postcolonial contexts. Chris Zisis has argued that “[t]here is a great gap, especially in the European North, where political action and activism are disassociated with academia, despite the numerous and constructive efforts, networks and groups, being built inside the university field” (Zisis 2016, 139). I therefore want to posit this research as an important starting point for further work on the question of performing human rights regarding academic sites of knowledge production. How might one balance the researcher persona with that of a practising activist in a way that maintains the specific political commitments demanded by their research content (Dreher, Flood and Martin 2013)? For example, how should those working within higher education resist the everyday bordering that is increasingly permeating the sector? As a temporary academic staff member in the UK, I was for example obliged to report international student activity in my classes to the UK Home Office, under the points-based visa system introduced in 2009, but resisted it through my own means of marking absent international student as present in my classrooms (Marschall 2022). We should also ask how we might use the UDHR to guide qualitative research practice in the arts and humanities and how might this be translated into accountable actions such as the reform of curricular design, teaching practices and research projects, or in disseminating and defining “impact” and “outcomes”?

We have work to do To understand human rights as an institution in dire need of transformation is a performative doing, rather than something given, fixed or necessarily

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progressive. Because of this, it is evident that human rights can always be done differently. The artistic interventions in this book show that human rights demand an unending performative gesture towards an always unknown and open future. Considering human rights’ transformative potential, Kathryn McNeilly emphasises that a performative “(re)doing” of rights should be understood as a “dynamic and generative doing that works to bring the content of rights, and the subjects who claim them, into being” (McNeilly 2017, 34). Indeed, I want again to stress my core argument on performing human rights, which emphasises the twofold meaning of performativity: on the one hand, performativity is the bringing into being of politico-legal subjects through their doing; on the other hand, it suggests doing as a creative means of world-making. By identifying both meanings in the artistic interventions examined in this book, we can grasp and embody a critical engagement with power, responsibility and solidarity that is central to human rights discourse (McNeilly 2017, 34). The artists’ visions of radical social change embrace “that which is unexpected, unpredictable and unknown”, and which therefore “holds the potential to stimulate attention to previously invisible relations of exclusion or ways of structuring society that differ to those currently perpetuating inequality” (McNeilly 2018, 6). The climate catastrophe is already causing migration due to uninhabitable lands, and Indigenous peoples have long been fighting for the protection of land and their rightful access to land. The continuous presence of rights movements, which renegotiate the anthropocentric notion of personhood, makes clear that the urgency for performing human rights on different terms continues to expand and demands new artistic and scholarly approaches. Commemorating the UDHR’s seventieth anniversary, Bill McKibben argued in the Guardian that a new human right is needed: “the right to an inhabitable planet”, to protect humans “against those forces that would damage the Earth’s systems” (McKibben et al. 2018). This kind of critical ecological and intergenerational understanding compels us to imagine and enact a concept of human rights that includes humans of the future as well as other beings. Importantly, different models of action deployed by indigenous communities and activist campaigns have succeeded in attributing personhood to animals, rivers and mountains. To give some examples: legal personhood has been granted to all rivers in Chile thanks to the campaigning efforts of the Chilean Red por los Ríos Libres (free-f lowing rivers network), indigenous peoples, citizens and environmental activists. The Colombian Atrato River f lows through ninety-one different indigenous communities and is their main source of food and cultural traditions; it is being represented in legal proceedings by fourteen legal guardians from affected communities. India has begun to bestow legal rights upon the Ganges and Yamuna rivers. In 2017, the Whanganui River in New Zealand inherited the same legal rights as a person and it can therefore be represented in court proceedings by communities and special committees. In 2016, New Zealand recognised all animals as sentient beings. Together, these examples challenge Western views

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of water as property, although what it actually means for a river to have the rights of a person remains unclear, as does the question of who will advocate on behalf of rivers, since they of course lack a voice of their own within rights discourse and the performing of human rights. These examples reveal a field ripe for future research into the decolonisation of human rights, towards a concept of more-than-human rights and their performing in and outside the arts. Artistic interventions can evoke a shift in how knowledge of rights is produced, recognised and shared. Artistic interventions can evoke a shift in the responsibility for the claiming, protection and defence of human rights: from the marginalised, victimised and excluded onto the institutions, privileges and modes of perception which shape who and what participates in human rights discourse. Asylum and forced migration are an ever-increasing nexus, comprising international claims to protection, personal movement, legal obligations, the issue of rightlessness, the concept of nation-states, social-cultural performances and geopolitical power relations. The nexus of asylum, migration and human rights binds together powerful transnational institutions, law, state policies, activism, lived experiences, and – crucially – aesthetics, collective imaginaries, creative world-making and performance art. Representing, storytelling, listening, assembling, imagining, decentering whiteness in knowledge production and co-producing a situated knowledge of rights: these are the cultural practices that determine the conditions through which rights are understood and performed. They bind the nexus together and can thus be seen as entry points and obligations, ripe with the potential to intervene and impact upon the politico-legal conditions of asylum, forced migration and statelessness. As a result, I hope my discussions of the artistic and activist knowledge of rights in different postcolonial contexts discussed here can be used by theatre makers and artists as a starting point for performative and dramaturgical work on forced migration, asylum, statelessness and human rights. What is to be done then? I repeat this question for a final time because it is pertinent that we have much work to do. We need to be held accountable for solidarity statements and we need to commit to a healing labour as part of the vexed relationships between academia and anti-racist, anti-fascist and anti-colonial activism. If driven by feelings of guilt or shame, questions such as “what is to be done then?” about solidary action can be problematic (Land 2015, 233). But when posed genuinely, they suggest a constructive answer, which I have argued for throughout this book: performing solidarity as a political project, one which stresses the need to reckon with structural societal discrimination, institutional violence, one’s own positionality and complicity within such structures. Simply put, well-intentioned political action is not in itself enough. Such action must incorporate critical self-ref lection by asking how we should deal with the legacy of colonial injustice, and how we can resist the reproduction of naturalised exclusionary actions. It is necessary to avoid deploying one’s privileges for progressive ends, although one

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consequence of this can be the marginalisation of oneself (Land 2015, 233). The work of solidarity can never come to a definitive end; rather, it demands the shared cultural and historic dispositions that ref lect harmful, racialised, citizenist “us and them” binaries to be continuously (re)negotiated. We have work to do.

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Index

academia 6, 21, 25, 33, 57, 60, 70, 83, 105–107, 118, 125, 129, 134–138, 152, 171–175, 177; see also education; knowledge; university accent 32, 67, 90, 94–96, 102, 111 activism 9, 15–16, 24–26, 34, 43, 46–48, 50–52, 55–56, 65, 70, 82, 89, 95, 122, 129, 134, 136, 139, 144–148, 156, 159, 162, 170–177; artivism 34, 37 Adami, Rebecca 79–80 aesthetics 3–4, 9, 12, 14, 17–18, 22, 26, 30, 33, 45, 71–72, 144, 150, 154, 163, 177; distributed aesthetics 48–51, 57–60; forensic aesthetics 17, 89–92, 95–100, 106–109, 112; institutional aesthetics 120–126, 129, 130–133, 139–140 Agamben, Giorgio 7 agency, political 7, 10, 17, 71–72, 77–79, 83, 88, 91–92, 112, 118, 126, 137, 140, 149, 162, 171 Ahmed, Sara 7, 10, 128–129, 140, 163 Alexievich, Svetlana 102 alliance 18, 26, 138, 139, 144–145, 150–153, 160, 163, 165, 171 Amnesty International 6, 50, 70, 88, 107–109, 154 Anniversary 65–71, 73, 75, 84, 118 Apter, Emily 94, 96, 98 Arendt, Hannah 7, 11, 15, 34–37, 78–79, 132; the right to have rights 7, 15, 36–37, 78; rightlessness 4, 7, 11, 14–15, 132, 177 Argyropoulou, Gigi 126 Arte Útil 29–33 Artist Organisations International 132–134 assembly 15, 16, 18, 56, 119, 133, 144–153, 158–165, 177; Assembly of

Refugees 131; UN General Assembly 5, 8, 64–65, 67 asylum 3–4, 10, 12, 14, 23–24, 49, 51–52, 59–60, 77, 90, 92, 118, 128, 139, 144, 146, 155, 164–165, 169–172, 177; asylum law/policy 13, 17, 22, 26, 43, 47, 53, 59, 80, 88, 95, 124, 137, 146; asylum seeker 4, 8, 10–13, 17, 36–37, 49, 71, 80, 88–90, 93, 95–98, 137, 140; asylum-seeking/asylum claim/process 3, 84, 90, 94, 112, 132, 137, 169; asylum system 3, 5, 10, 12, 14, 17, 28, 92 audibility 76, 82–83, 90–92 audience 1, 3, 9, 17, 21, 23, 27, 31–33, 37, 42–43, 45–48, 50, 51, 57–60, 65–76, 82, 85, 88–91, 95, 99, 103, 108, 117, 121, 127, 135–136 Austin, J. L. 8 authenticity 91–94, 98, 112 Azoulay, Ariella 6, 118–119 Bala, Sruti 34 Balibar, Étienne 6 Balme, Christopher 48, 57, 119, 123–125 Bassel, Leah 82–83 Bedir, Merve 154 Belarus Free Theatre 9 Belfiore, Eleonora 138 belonging 3, 22–23, 25, 37, 74, 77–84, 89–94, 103, 108–112, 123, 135, 155 Bickford, Susan 82–83 Bieberstein, Alice von 46, 56 Bishop, Claire 29, 127 Bitte liebt Österreich! 51 Black Lives Matter 110–111, 159 Boal, Augusto 9 The Book of Blood: Human Writes 1–3 border 5, 8, 11–12, 23–25, 28–30, 43–45, 78–80, 94, 101–102, 111,

198 Index 125, 150, 153, 155; border crossing 3, 10, 15, 22–23, 36–37, 84, 104–105, 112, 116, 140, 144, 169–170; border management/protection/control 10–12, 14, 51–59, 106, 116, 130, 146–147, 175 Bourdieu, Pierre 125 Bourriaud, Nicolas 163 Bouteldja, Houria 103 Bowman, Jason E. 65 Brecht, Bertolt 18, 21, 42, 121 Brown, Wendy 28 Bruguera, Tania 3, 15, 25–37, 50, 170 Bryan-Wilson, Julie 120 Butler, Judith 58, 103, 158–161 Calais Jungle 132, 135 Cameron, Deborah 103 Camnitzer, Luis 35 Cañas, Tania 13–14 Castañeda, Heide 47, 132 Cavarero, Adriana 69, 72, 77–80, 83 Centre for Political Beauty 3, 16, 42–61, 133, 140, 170; 2099 42–43 citizenship 3, 6–8, 10, 11, 14, 17, 28, 32, 43, 57, 78, 98, 118, 132, 146, 153–156 colonialism 3, 15, 23–25, 30, 32–33, 37, 60, 73, 92, 94–95, 139, 145–146, 148, 150–152, 156, 160, 163, 169, 171, 173–174, 177; see also neo-colonialism; post-colonialism Conesa, Ester 138 Conflicted Phonemes 88–89, 93, 95–98 Constable, Marianne 103 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees 11–12, 131 courtroom 8, 72–77, 89, 92, 101, 110, 118, 149 Cox, Emma 3, 12–14, 16, 22–23, 47, 52–53, 55, 57, 112, 116 crisis 4–5, 12–13, 15, 21–24, 37, 42–43, 47, 52–53, 57, 60, 76, 128, 132, 137–138, 155, 163, 165, 169 Crisp, Jeff 171 Danewid, Ida 24–25 The Dead Are Coming 16, 45, 51–59 death 28, 31, 54, 65, 70, 129, 173 decolonisation 4, 23, 33, 118, 120, 124, 128, 137, 144–146, 163, 169, 177 dependency 5–6, 16, 18, 37, 72, 77, 84, 104, 126, 149, 158, 165

deportation 4–5, 11–12, 14, 44, 88, 94, 98, 130 detention 4–5, 9, 11, 14, 53, 59 Dhawan, Nikita 161–162 DiMaggio, Paul 125, 134 discourse 7, 10, 13, 16–18, 23–32, 45, 47, 50, 57, 60–68, 71–80, 84, 92, 100–101, 103–105, 110–112, 118–120, 123–124, 130, 132, 140, 144–147, 158–162, 165, 169, 176–177 discrimination 4–6, 10, 47, 73, 92, 106, 118, 177 disfluency, ethical 16, 52, 57–59 displacement 3, 5, 12, 16–17, 54, 58, 61, 78, 130–131, 137, 139–140, 152 Douzinas, Costas 6–7, 67, 80, 170 dramaturgy 16, 21, 42, 45, 48–50, 65, 71, 108, 116–117, 120, 128–129, 136, 177 Dreher, Tanja 72–73, 81–83, 175 Dublin Regulation 44, 47, 52, 130 Dziuban, Zuzanna 89 Eades, Diana 103 education 5, 8, 13, 26, 33–34, 64–65, 70, 98, 105–106, 119, 124, 128, 133–134, 137–138, 156, 158, 160, 165, 171, 175 El peso de la culpa 33 embodiment 6, 49, 56–57, 59, 65–80, 84, 92–93, 99, 119, 122, 138, 158–159, 162, 164, 170, 172, 175 emergency 11, 13, 52–53 Ensemble Nadar 115–117 equality 7, 28, 37, 78, 82–83, 91, 117, 139, 154, 162, 174–175; inequality 16, 37, 71, 73, 90, 131 Erster Europäischer Mauerfall 44 ethics 3, 14, 17, 23–26, 43, 48, 51, 57–58, 68, 88, 138, 140, 151, 174; see also disfluency European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) 5, 12, 53, 55 European Union (EU) 12, 30, 44, 47, 52–56, 58, 116, 118, 124, 127–128, 147 evidence 43–44, 47–48, 83, 85, 88–89, 93, 95, 98, 101, 110–111 Evren, Erdem 46, 50, 56 exclusion 4, 11, 47, 58–59, 71, 76, 91, 99, 112, 119–120, 151–152, 161, 165, 170, 174–177 Feiss, Ellen 26–31, 127–128, 162 Finkelpearl, Tom 27 Fischer, Ernst 1

Index  199 Flüchtlinge Fressen 44 Forensic Architecture 3, 89, 107, 110, 133 forensics 7, 52, 89–92, 95, 111 Fraser, Andrea 3, 17, 121–123 freedom of expression 9, 15–16, 44, 68, 71, 74 The Freedom of Speech Itself 89, 93–95, 98 Freeman, Michael 8 Freshwater, Helen 57 Fusco, Coco 31, 33 Gielen, Pascal 117–118, 148, 162 Gill, Rosalind 138 Global North 31–34, 124, 144, 153, 171, 175 Goto, Hiromi 104 grief 16, 46, 52, 56, 89; grievability 16, 51, 58, 59; mourning 55–56, 156, 170 Guy, Georgina 108 Hall, Stuart 24 Hamdan, Lawrence Abu 3, 17, 88–112, 140, 170 Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism 34–37 Holmes, Seth 47, 132 Home Office, UK 106, 152, 175 hooks, bell 33 hope 4, 10, 34, 37, 43, 132, 163–164, 170–171, 177 hospitality 3, 18, 25, 47, 59, 60, 144, 165 humanitarianism 12, 22, 45–46, 52–53, 56, 59, 162 Hunt, Nancy Rose 103 Ihde, Don 72 imagination 17, 46, 76, 84, 129, 144–145, 148–149, 155, 164, 170 Immigrant Movement International 15, 25–34, 37, 133, 140 immigration 4, 44, 59, 145, 172; immigrant 10–11, 25–31, 135, 145, 170; immigration office/authorities 14, 53, 94–95, 98, 112 imperialism 6, 10, 13, 23, 24, 31, 34, 45, 51, 60, 73, 82, 102, 130, 136, 146, 155, 172 institution 118, 123, 125, 126, 134, 175; academic institution 106, 174–175; alter-institution 132–139, 145, 152; art institution 121–123; courtroom as institution 75; theatre as institution 4, 33, 43, 84, 138–139; see also violence

institutional critique 15, 17, 118–126, 131, 133, 144 interpellation 22, 80–81, 89 Jackson, Shannon 29, 121–132, 159 Jean-Monnet-Brücke 44 Jestrović, Silvija 21, 24 Jordan, John 70 justice 10, 29, 64, 70, 74–75, 80, 82, 85, 145; injustice 8, 16–17, 71, 98, 177; global justice 8, 115–119, 139, 146, 159, 174; social justice 8, 7, 83, 125, 128, 131 Kapur, Ratna 6 Kershaw, Baz 136 Kindertransporthilfe 43 knowledge 6, 9, 10, 26, 32, 50, 66, 75–78, 82–84, 93, 98, 119, 137, 164, 170–177 Kokoli, Alexandra 66, 69 Komîna film a Rojava 156 Kötter, Daniel 115–116 Kurdi, Alan 155 Kurdish Women’s Movement 3, 18, 103, 151, 153–158, 164–165, 170; see also Rojava The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination 70, 133 Lacey, Kate 73, 90 Langhoff, Shermin 55 Language Gulf in the Shouting Valley 89, 104 Last, Angela 130, 134, 144–146 The Laundry Project 70 Lawrence, Stephen 9 Left, the 21, 28, 30, 36, 100, 136, 161, 165 legal matter 17, 68–71, 73, 75–76, 84, 88 Léger, Marc James 146 Leibniz (live art collective) 1–3 Leonard, Tom 88, 112 The Library of Performing Rights 70 Linsley, Johanna 123, 126 listening 15, 16, 17, 34, 66–85, 88–92, 98–100, 103–107, 111–112, 118–119, 136–137, 140, 146, 177 Live Art Development Agency 65, 70 Lütticken, Sven 133, 137–138 MacKinnon, Catherine 6 Malzacher, Florian 132–133 Man 3, 6–7, 78, 131 Mantel, Hilary 102

200 Index marginalization 4, 9, 15, 22, 26–29, 36, 56, 72, 76, 81–83, 89, 119, 130, 148, 151, 159, 161, 164–165, 177–178 Martin, Carol 111 Maxim Gorki Theater 44, 55 Mazière, Thomas de 54–55 Mbembe, Achille 58 McDonald’s Radio University 135–139 McKibben, Bill 176 McNeilly, Kathryn 8, 170, 176 Mediterranean Sea 12, 22–24, 44, 51–56, 59 Merkel, Angela 52–55 migration 4, 10, 12, 21–22, 24, 26, 31, 43, 53, 57, 83–84, 94–96, 106, 112, 128, 139, 146, 165, 169–177; migration and art/theatre 14, 29, 51, 59–60; migration movement 16, 24, 37, 61, 91 Mooney, Annabelle 2–3, 68 Mosquera, Gerardo 35–36 Mousonturm 135–137 Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk 17, 120–122 Nardo, Rebecca Di 32 nation-state 5–8, 11, 22, 37, 78, 131, 146– 153, 155–156, 158, 164–165, 170, 177 Necropolitics 58–59 Neimanis, Astrida 22–23 neo-colonialism 46, 146, 162 New World Summit 18, 144–158, 161–165 non-governmental organization (NGO) 5, 44, 46, 50, 89, 115, 117, 118, 139, 153 Norton-Taylor, Richard 9 Nyers, Peter 131 Nyong’o, Tavia 28 Őcalan, Abdullah 156 Őğüt, Ahmet 137, 139 oppression 9, 10, 24, 34, 36, 64, 76, 82, 100, 103, 106, 120, 134, 145, 149, 152–153, 155–159, 165 Orbán,Viktor 53 OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts 9 Parameswaran, Ameet 21 Parker, James E.K. 74–76, 85 participation 9, 13–15, 23, 30–34, 48–49, 57, 77–78, 111, 119, 123, 127, 138, 144, 148–151, 165

Perec, Georges 102 performativity 3, 7–8, 32–34, 51, 66, 68–71, 75–76, 84, 105, 126, 160, 175–176; non-performativity 10, 128–129, 140 persecution 5, 10, 11, 25, 54, 135, 155 personhood 11, 176 Phipps, Alison 106, 172–173 Pinter, Harold 102–103 post-colonialism 6, 12, 17, 31, 81, 118, 152, 162, 165 privilege 4, 6, 10, 13–14, 22–23, 31, 34, 57, 60, 66, 72, 83, 85, 106, 121, 123, 160–161, 172–174, 177 race 11–12, 28–29, 31, 77, 82, 119, 128, 155, 171, 174, 177; racialization 3–4, 12–15, 18, 22, 24, 30–32, 37, 46, 58, 67, 72–73, 79–82, 84, 92, 101, 136, 146, 159, 163, 165, 169, 174, 178; racism 25, 47, 49, 51, 53, 81, 91, 100, 119, 128–129, 146, 155, 165, 169, 172–174 Rae, Paul 8–10 Ramsay, Georgina 17, 130–131 Rancière, Jacques 7, 74–75 Read, Alan 75–76 RECHT Ökonomien des Handelns 2 17, 115–120, 139 refugee 3, 7–8, 17, 25–26, 36, 71, 81, 88, 90, 92, 147, 152, 159, 171, 174; refugee crisis 4, 12, 15, 21–24, 37, 42–44, 47, 52, 60, 128, 155, 169; refugee and theatre/performance 13–14, 16, 22–23, 45–46, 51–61, 135–140; refugees and temporality 130–132, 163–165; refugee and voice analysis 91–98; refugee-ness 24, 80, 83–84, 89, 112, 130, 137, 170; refugee terminology 10–12 representation 2, 10, 13, 15–18, 22–23, 27, 30, 36–37, 46–47, 51–59, 76–77, 81, 84, 88, 91–92, 103, 107–108, 116, 118–119, 123–125, 130–139, 147, 152–153, 157, 162–165, 169 Rickman, Alan 9 Ridout, Nicholas 58 rightlessness 4, 7, 11, 14, 15, 132, 177 rights repeated – an act of memory 16, 64–68, 73, 88 RISE: Refugees, Survivors and eX-detainees 13–14, 22–23 Robbins, Christa Noel 23, 31 Rodríguez-Garavito, César A. 6 Rojava 133, 149–158

Index  201 Ross, Monica 3, 6, 16–17, 65–85, ¾8, 118, 140, 170 Rosser, Anna 138 Rubber Coated Steel 89, 110 Ruch, Philipp 51 sans papiers 10 saviourism 4, 18, 46, 49, 56, 59, 144, 165 Saydnaya 98, 106–109 Scarabicchi, Caterina 26 Schengen 12, 52, 115 Schlingensief, Christoph 51, 60 Seidl, Hannes 115–116 Sheik, Simon 129–129 The Silent University 133, 135, 137 Skaf, May 44 Slahi, Mahemoud Ould 150 Slow Scholarship movement 138 social media 45, 47–49, 52–53, 57, 60, 110, 137 socially engaged art 13, 15, 22–24, 29–31, 49, 60, 70, 127, 146 solidarity 3, 4, 10, 14, 16, 18, 22, 24–25, 31, 47, 56–57, 60, 71, 83–84, 122, 125, 130–135, 138–139, 142, 144–147, 151–152, 163–164, 176–178 sound 14–15, 35–36, 71–77, 85, 89, 101, 103, 105, 109–110, 117 Sousa Santos, Boaventura de 6 Spackman, Helen 1 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 6, 27, 92, 162 Staal, Jonas 3, 18, 128, 132–133, 146–154, 170 statelessness 14, 18, 24, 28, 44, 118, 133, 139–140, 144–158, 162–165, 170–171, 174, 177 Stevenson, Lisa 80–81 Stierl, Maurice 56–57, 59–60 storytelling 29, 48, 77–79, 84, 89, 92, 102–103, 108, 112, 119, 171, 177 subjectivity 6, 16, 24, 28–29, 43, 47, 51, 55, 57, 69–72, 77–78, 80–82, 89–92, 99, 112, 120, 122–124, 176 survival 27, 89, 103, 106–108, 112, 159 Takayama, Akira 3, 18, 135–139, 170 Tatlin’s Whisper #6 34–35 technology 17, 48, 71–72, 88–89, 95, 136, 159 temporariness 17, 18, 22, 29, 49, 124, 130–132, 138–139, 144, 146, 163–165

testimony 9, 15, 17, 27, 75, 83, 88, 90–95, 98, 101, 104, 107–109, 111 Theater Dortmund 42–43 This Whole Time There Were No Landmines 104–105 Thomaidis, Konstantinos 71 Thompson, James 29 Thompson, Nato 29 Tobin, Amy 71 trauma 3, 108, 155 Tret’iakov, Sergei 102 tribunal 17, 76, 88, 98 truth 45, 47, 90–92, 98, 101, 109, 111–112, 169 Tuck, Eve 145 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea 116 uniqueness 69, 77–80, 92, 98 United Nations (UN) 4–6, 18, 118, 124, 147–148, 172 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 5, 11, 53, 144, 156, 169, 171 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 1, 5–6, 8, 11, 16, 64–71, 75, 79, 83–84, 118, 144, 158, 175–176 universality 6–7, 24–25, 30, 32, 37, 45, 64–65, 68, 77–78, 119, 132 university 98, 106, 135–138, 174 vacuum cleaner 70 verbatim 66, 76, 91–92 victimhood 4, 18, 46, 56, 136, 144, 152–153, 165, 177 violence 8–9, 18, 25, 31, 33, 42, 46, 53, 58, 59, 83, 89, 95, 102, 105–106, 109, 110–111, 130, 139, 144, 152, 155; institutional violence 4–6, 13–14, 18, 23, 60, 84–85, 98, 103, 125–126, 146, 153, 158–159, 162, 170, 172, 174, 177 visibility 6, 76, 91, 123, 136; invisibility 46, 56, 68, 69, 74, 75, 82, 105, 174, 176 voice 16–17, 36, 71–72, 77, 82, 104–109, 111, 162; to give voice 9, 73–74, 76–77, 89, 91, 103, 109, 112, 139; voice analysis 90, 92–98; voice and political agency 74, 81–83, 89–91, 111, 119, 125, 140, 151, 177; voice and vocal ontology 77–80; voice in performance 35, 66, 68–69, 76, 84, 88, 160 Vourloumis, Hypatia 126

202 Index vulnerability 14, 25, 46, 58, 68–69, 74, 76, 79–82, 84–85, 104, 122, 159–162 Wake, Caroline 12, 19, 91–92 Warsza, Joanna 132 Weiss, Peter 9 Weizman, Eyal 89, 100, 110 whiteness 4, 10, 13, 32, 34, 46, 49, 57, 59, 60, 72, 101, 110, 118–119, 125, 136, 145, 149, 152, 155, 159–160, 169, 171–174, 177 Wilmer, Steve 12

Withers, Rachel 6 witness 7, 88, 98, 102, 108, 110, 111 world-making 16, 72, 74, 92, 161, 176–177 Yang, K. Wayne 145 Yo También Exijo 34 Zaroulia, Marilena 3, 6, 22, 47, 52–53, 57, 116 Zisis, Chris 175 Žižek, Slavoj 7