User:₳(ɤ)ɠɭaḯa/P R O J E C T P R O P O S A L

* To be added references within the text *

What do you want to make?

I would like to explore the bureaucratic dramaturgies within the educational institution I am currently part as a student. How bureaucratic rituals change through years inside the institution and how these established or de-established rituals constitute material evidence of its transformation. The main umbrella questions that float in my head and hopefully over my research are:

1) How the educational bureaucratic apparatus of higher education as a visible - invisible infrastructure can reflect policies regarding migration filter and border control and how this is reflected partly on the documents themselves?

2) How newly established bureaucratic rituals/structures can indicate or demonstrate the corporization of the institution.

3) How a bureaucratic document can (de)-construct, classify or fragment the person and what disruption or conflict emerges when the personal story / experience / insight comes upon the artifact of a document?

I would dare to name – at the moment at least - the structure/the form of this project as a counter-archive that will hold and embrace my field research. By the entity archive I perceive the collection and concentration of the material of my research that will attempt to create a parallel and possibly confronting narrative, putting together fragmented knowledge about the institution and address hopefully the above open-ended questions. By the prefix counter I want to reverse the given meaning of the archive as a closed structure/entity of knowledge belonging to the arche (those in power) and deal with questions of openness and public. Archive as a space of appearance of marginalized knowledge that provokes the emergence of discourse within the institution.

The archive will potentially have a twofold structure a physical/tangible form (a box/ a folder/ a holder / a shelf within the institution) and a digital form (a website, a wiki page, a platform).

“(…) instead of regarding the archive as an institution that preserves the past as though its contents do not directly impact us, I propose to see the archive as a shared place, define it as shared place that enables one to maintain the past incomplete, or to preserve what Benjamin refer to as the “incompleteness of the past”” , Ariella Azoulay

How do you plan to make it?

My research will attempt to extract and re-create knowledge using different means, steps and tools.

1.a. Entering the administration's territory and collecting statics by interviewing the course coordinator. How the quantity and the quality of the documents change through the years and towards which nationalities. I will make sure that course coordinator is allowed to share information like this and potentially I will look for a permission form in order to extract this information. I will ask if I can have access to the empty forms through this period of time in order or browse them and observe potential changes. After the transcription of the interview I will share the text with Leslie to make sure she feels comfortable.

b. In the case I have this access I will try to create a new folder/holder of the scanned material focusing on the documents and looking more thoroughly the selected material at this stage by performing editing, highlighting, classifying them

2. In parallel with the document investigation and the statistics produced through this I am planning to organize a series of small interviews taken from:

a. COIA (Center of International Affairs) employees. Since COIA in collaboration with IND constitutes the first filter in the application process and the ones who are in charge of the students’ “scanning” (term used by COIA employee during our interview). I would like to highlight the friction of this intense relation between the two different but highly interconnected institutions.

b. my peers – students of xpub and lens based media as the third part of this process. My intention at this point is to extract the intimate personal story behind the struggle of bureaucracy and talk about vulnerability and violence hidden behind the document.

Also, in this case I will share the material with the interviwees and make sure they feel comfortable and everything is anonymous

3. Investigation of the organization NUFFIC (the dutch organization of internationalization of education) that started collaborating with educational institutions from 2011 and is in charge of checking the validity of the diplomas via technology during the application process. I will also browse and keep notes on the factsheets that they produce every year with statistics on higher education.

4. I will keep checking the IND website to get a taste of the state’s narrative on migration and the forms/applications that are there. Maybe too ambitious plan. However, a browsing is for sure worth trying.

5. Playing around and messing with bureaucratic aesthetics, language and forms by creating small prototypes and distribute them to my peers (xpub1, xpub2, students, tutors). Forced memory story forms, stamps, questionnaires, leeszaal docs are ongoing experiments that will be included at the archive-holder at the end of the year.

{ My candidacy and hopefully my participation in the IMR as an ongoing project that runs in parallel. Attending, taking part, observing or spying the procedures of this instrument of negotiation with the managers, as a tool provided by the institution. In case I participate or attend the IMR I will try to unpack through my lens the structure and the limitations that encloses. Maybe I can add my notes and conversations at the archive/holder at the end of the year in case a find efficient connections with the rest of the research.}

What is your timetable?

NOVEMBER

   • reading and annotating rituals
   • browsing, scanning the archive of the students’ documents  2002-2022
   • writing thesis 
   • Leeszaal event preparation and event day 7/11/2023
   • deadline for thesis outline and project proposal
   • first meeting on November 21st , 15:00 – 17:00 INSTITUTE’S PARTICIPATION COUNCIL (IMR) and notetaking
   • Always checking if I still have a question.

DECEMBER

   • reading and annotating rituals
   • browsing, scanning the archive of the students’ documents  2002-2022 (!finish the browsing before  Christmas vacation)
   • (IMR meetings and notes)
   • writing thesis 
   • deadline for assessment
   • fake assesement 
   • real assessment 11/12/2023
   • Always checking if I still have a question.
   • Happy New Year

JANUARY

   • reading and annotating rituals
   • Keep writing
   • Keep attending IMR and notetaking. 
   • transcription and edit of the the interview with COIA administrator
   • prepare and structure my interview with Leslie
   • Always checking if I still have a question.

FEBRUARY

   • reading and annotating rituals
   • Keep writing. More intense writing
   • Keep attending IMR and notetaking. 
   • do the interview with Leslie and transcribe
   • Start looking more thoroughly the filtered material that you gained form the investigation on the students’ docs archive. Start the classification, comparison, annotation. Include your observations in the thesis (2nd chapter).
   • Start organising during the winter break your loose interviews/conversations with tour peers.

MARCH

   • reading and annotating rituals
   • Keep writing. Even more intense writing
   • Do some small interviews/ conversations with your peers. See if this material is fruitful to include it in your thesis (3rd chapter)
   • Writiiingggg AAAAA
   • Check if the question is in your text or start feel desperate and small
   • somewhere close the thesis draft

APRIL

   • deliver the final text
   • less reading rituals
   • start the production/ making mode
   • see the material you have so far and start figure out ways of organising, classifying, editing 
   • start thinking of the time and space of appearance, the receivers of this information. The opening of the archive moment
   • keep messing around with bureaucratic forms. Keeip being annoying by making people to fill the forms
   • start thinking on the ARCHIVE HOLDER, deposit of past, present, future (How do I invite people for potential extension of the research?)

MAY

   • less reading rituals
   • continue with production/ making mode
   • maybe continue with some conversations on the intimate stories to enrich your archive
   • keep messing around with bureaucratic forms. Make people to fill the forms
   • design the archive holder and materialise

JUNE

   • design your thesis booklet and print
   • concentrate everything and finalize the material of the holder itself
   • graduation show preparations
   • collective publication preparations
   • assessment preparation
   • release of the forced memory story form. Make the book and give it as gift to your peers (fun project/experiment in parallel)
   • graduation

* This three last questions are deeply inter-connected for me but I will do my best to untangle them and structure a bit my chaotic thinking *

Why do you want to make it?

One of my drives to start shifting and focusing on my personal experience of studying in higher education in Netherlands were conversations that I had with people regarding the way matter is addressed and put into discourse. As I was unpacking my short experience and keeping disguising on how politics and publics are produced in higher education, I realized that despite the radicality and how the of the reproduced narratives, there was a lack in how somebody questions the structure.

Enlighting conversations I had within XPUB and with classmates about our experiences, the different pathways we have been through, our different cultural backgrounds and sometimes disproportionate struggles in comparison with others were crucial and a starting point for my first thinkings on this project.

My intention through this project is to do an institutional critique and support it through situated research about the higher education and within a higher education institution and attempt to unfold or highlight or just start observing the way things are given and how we can deal with the given (often naturalized) matters and create transformative possibilities.

I would like to highlight, unfold or just open a conversation within an educational structure on how the higher education in a European country can reflect policies around migration, border control, in a less profound way. How education can filter and distinguish, how it can reproduce efficiently itself and how we can disrupt even instantly the continuity of these hierarchical processes by start putting things on the table.

Who can help you and how?

• Leslie the gatekeeper of knowledge and the caretaker that gives access and her priceless insight , experience and information

• Manetta, Marloes, Joseph to provide their knowledge, feedback and some fertile ground to my flying seed-ideas • My beloved xpub2 peers with their patience filling my forms and provide me with feedback, support, care and their personal documents

• xpub3s (<3) and potentially xpub1s sharing their bureaucracy struggles and stories

• COIA administrators/officers

• IMR (and CMR like Lila) members for gossiping and criticizing the procedures and take notes on them

• maybe some other people that I am not able to name at this point

Relation to previous practice

Coming from a spatial architectural background, site-specificity became a tool or a critical lens through which I started exploring, reading and understanding my surroundings and develop practice. My interest in archives, memory practices, public space, counter mapping processes as well as institutional critique approaches still is there unleashing possibilities.

relevant projects:

In my diploma thesis Counter-monument for the self settled Afghan camp in Agyia of Patras” a counter-monument was a mainly archaeological research involved collecting “traces” regarding everyday life in the camp. Data were collected through digital ethnographic methods, comprising of refugees-generated representations in the form of online posts in platforms and social media, providing invaluable insights of the camp’s everyday social reproduction. Subsequently, we produced an archive of audio excerpts and lists of objects that reconstruct instant moments of everyday life experiences within the camp.

I consider counter-memory as the strategy towards reconstructing a series of stories, narratives and even the very existence of the marginalized others. The strategy of a counter-monument challenges dominant contemporary representations of the site’s history, along with the mechanisms through which such representations are institutionalized and disseminated, while activating memories and narratives that have been concealed and displaced.

My research thesis, titled “Five experiential reconstructions of Piraiki Patraiki’s occupation” was developed around the production of an archive concerning the reconstruction of narratives related to a factory’s premises in Patras, occupied by the factory’s workers for three months in 1991.

I perceive archive as a public artistic practice and as an act of emancipation that enables the deconstruction of identities, concepts and groups from naturalized ideological images and confer meaning in words, concepts, terms which have been emptied of meaning.

The project How do we library that? or alternatively Garden Leeszaal was crucial in diving into the structure of libraries as systems of producing knowledge and unpacking classification as a process that (un)names, distinguishes, excludes, displaces, organizes life. It was crucial for me in order to start understanding the notion of infra-structure . Libraries as complex social infrastructures. From the library to the section to the shelf to the book to the page to the text. The zooming in and zooming out process. The library as a plain text. During the collective moment in Leeszaal was really moving seeing people literally diving into recycle bins, grab books, tear pages apart, drawing, pen plotting, weaving words together, cutting words, removing words, overwriting, printing, scanning. It was kind of magic having an object in the end. A whole book made by all of them in the evening. Having them creating the object. Stations, machines, a cloud of cards. A sleeve that warms up THE BOOK.

"to change the physical form of artifacts is to change the act of reading, but profoundly to transform the metaphoric network structuring the relation of world to world. To change the material artifacts is to transform the context and circumstances for interacting with the words, which inevitably change the meaning of the word as well. This transformation of meaning is especially potent when the words reflexively interact with the inscription technologies that produce them. " Writing Machines

This experience is gonna be enlightening in the ways I will manipulate the document at the second stage of the project.

During SI21 TTY we messed around teletype and typewriters. These machines used to be instrument of administrative workforce and a liberating expressing tool for concrete poetry and literature. This emerging workforce, largely made up of women and minorities who were until then excluded from most qualified jobs, used typewriters and administration aesthetics to express themselves, re-organize and underline structural inequalities.

This was the inspiration for starting developing bureaucratic forms as interface of potential personal stories.

Lastly, my involvement in intersectional political groups and actions related to migration, feminism, environment, labour is always an experience and a lens through which I see and practice things. Overlapping spheres of doing, talking, practicing, existing.

Relation to a larger context

The last many years I have developed an interest in the notion of border. How a border is defined, how as an entity defines and how is performed. (URSULA BIEMANN) I used to think of borders in a material concrete way, coming from a country of European South that constitutes a rigid/strict/violent border – the European border – that repulses and kills thousands of migrants and refugees from Asia and Africa.

One of the main topics emerged from the perspective of migrants and refugees was the state of being un-documented. What it means to be documented and what inefficiently documented within a territory?

My identity as a privileged migrant coming from the South Europe to the North for studies did not allow me to understand entirely the precarity and the violence of being in the marginal state of existing and non existing in the eyes of state. I started perceiving bureaucratic apparatus as an omnipresent immaterial border(GHOST BUREAUCRACY), a ghost infrastructure that you always encounter but don’t really see, an infrastructure that lays in between the cold grey zone of visibility and invisibility. How bureaucracy makes us stupid and vulnerable in front of it? (DAVID GRAEBER)We rarely question it but we always have to perform it efficiently in order to exist properly.

Although, these thoughts were (and still are) flying aggressively inside my head, I decided to zoom in and take advantage of my current situation as a master student in Netherlands starting my small situated (maybe ethnographical) research within the dutch institution that hosts me.

INSPIRING WORK : FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE +++

References (current and potential)

Books:

• Bourdieu, P. (1984). *Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste*. Harvard University Press.
• Graeber, D. (2015). The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville House Publishing.
• Katherine Hayles, Lunenfeld, P., Burdick, A., and MIT Press (2005). *Writing Machines*. Cambridge; London: MIT Press.
• Khosravi, S. (2021). *Waiting - A Project in Conversation*. Bielefeld Transcript.
• Le Guin, U.K. (1999). The Dispossessed. Turtleback Books.
• Samellas, A. (2020). "(Forced) Movement". kyklada.press

Journals

• Berghahn Journals. (n.d.). *The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology Volume 33 Issue 1: Remaking the Public Good: A New Anthropology of Bureaucracy*. [Available at https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/cja/33/1/cja.33.issue-1.xml]
• Borelli, C., Poy, A., and Rué, A. (2023). "Governing Asylum without 'Being There': Ghost Bureaucracy, Outsourcing, and the Unreachability of the State." *Social Sciences*, 12(3), 169. [DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12030169]
• Churcher, M. and Talbot, D. (2020). The Corporatisation of Education: Bureaucracy, boredom, and Transformative Possibilities. New Formations, [online] 100(100), p.28. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/49053008/The_Corporatisation_of_Education_Bureaucracy_Boredom_and_Transformative_Possibilities [Accessed 5 Nov. 2023]
• Derrida, J. and Prenowitz, E. (1995). Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Diacritics, 25(2), pp.9–63. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/465144.
• Kouros, P. (n.d.). "The Public Art of Performative Archiving." [Available at https://www.academia.edu/35065602/The_public_art_of_performative_archiving]
• Strathern, M. (2000). The Tyranny of Transparency. British Educational Research Journal, [online] 26(3), pp.309–321. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1501878 [Accessed 11 May 2020].

Videos

• Azoulay, A. (n.d.). *Un-Documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder*. [Available at https://vimeo.com/490778435]
• Biemann, U. (n.d.). *GEOBODIES | Ursula Biemann*. [Available at https://geobodies.org/art-and-videos/performing-the-border/]

Websites

• Politicalconcepts.org. (2011). Archive: Ariella Azoulay. [Available at http://www.politicalconcepts.org/archive-ariella-azoulay/]