Dear Imara,(1)

Thank you for the invitation to write an essay on being undocumented in the city. My contribution takes the practices of We Sell Reality as well as Raul Balai and Ehsan Fardjadniya, who will present their work during Refresh Amsterdam ​​#2: War & Conflict, as of point of departure. When I started to prepare to write, I was wondering what experience I have of being “undocumented,” and whether I have “the right” to write about that experience. Since I believe in making one’s own positionality transparent,​​​​(2) I would like to start with a personal yet​ ​collective experience. While I am “documented,” I have no nationality, but rather a temporary residence permit in the birthplace of my ancestors, which is under continual threat of being revoked. Being “undocumented” is a constant, looming threat for myself and 361,700 other Palestinians living in Jerusalem. I somewhat understand the constant and exhausting struggle to achieve the status of being “documented”—and to remain so. I am well aware that undergoing the ​​​​h​ardships​​ ​of being ​“undocumented"​ in Amsterdam and experiencing the looming threat in Jerusalem are not one and the same. I merely wish to draw some parallels to be able to write from an embodied experience. 

In their project Edgelanders (2023), Raul Balai and Ehsan Fardjadniya start from the position that the city government of Amsterdam is obligated to provide unconditional shelter to everyone, including the “undocumented.” While promoting itself as a “safe haven,” the city has a proclaimed commitment to international human rights and must comply with ​​​​the 2014 ruling of the European Court of Human Rights. However, the reality is much different: in practice, Amsterdam has been unable to fulfill its duty of care, despite promises made by administrators in recent years.

In Edgelanders, Raul Balai and Ehsan Fardjadniya construct a (fictitious) trial against the city of Amsterdam, to hold the city government accountable to its ethical image and legal obligations. They intend to gradually build a case. In the years leading up to that moment, they will gather evidence, hear testimonies from witnesses, and formulate the indictment. All the while, we are implicated as an audience in this process. Through different presentation formats, exchanges occur with various stakeholders and residents of the city, such as “undocumented” migrants, “documented” citizens, politicians, lawyers, and organizations involved in addressing this issue.

​​​​​​​At the Amsterdam Museum, Raul and Ehsan will present a timeline of the previous legal proceedings that have determined the conditions of the so-called bed-bad-broodvoorziening, or BBB.(3) This Dutch policy provides temporary shelter, basic amenities (such as food), and healthcare to “undocumented” migrants who are unable to return to their countries of origin but are not eligible for regular social support due to their legal status. Enacted in 2014, the policy was the result of a complaint filed with the European Committee of Social Rights on January 17, 2013, at the Conference of European Churches, regarding the Dutch government’s treatment of refugees who had exhausted all legal remedies. The Committee found violations against several articles of the European Social Charter, ruling that the Dutch government had infringed upon the rights of individuals without residence permits, failing to protect their human dignity. It also asserted that the Netherlands must ensure that “undocumented​​ aliens” have access to food, clothing, and shelter, as a necessary obligation toward safeguarding their human dignity.

The artists have worked on a physical rendering of the timeline as part of the project. Handwritten details of the case, as told to them by lawyer Pim Fischer, are accompanied by documentation of the heated debates about the BBB policy between Dutch political leaders. Alongside we will find the personal history of Souleyman, an “undocumented” friend of the artists. As a base for the timeline, Raul and Ehsan chose a canvas-like material as it is used at construction sites and at refugee camps, where it is utilized to create a rudimentary type of shelter. The different storylines cover different areas of the canvas, with the legal and political timeline occupying the upper and Souleyman’s lived experience the lower part. Additionally, film material is projected onto the canvas to show reports from witnesses and descriptions of the impact of the changing laws on people like Souleyman.

This very much reminds me of the exhausting paperwork and evidence one must constantly assemble in Jerusalem, where door-to-door checks of Palestinian houses involve being able to instantly show the municipality representative a thread and needle, or fresh milk in the fridge, as evidence of residence. And where friends think twice about marrying persons who hold IDs from the West Bank, wary of being stuck for years in bureaucratic processes, unable to live together in either the West Bank or Jerusalem. ​​​​“Undocumented” refugees in Amsterdam face similar Kafkaesque situations, unable to reunite with their families and being under constant scrutiny. They are burdened by an unapologetic, unbending legal narrative: the master narrative, in which these small lives are made invisible.

I was thinking about delving into the absurdity of “the undocumented” as a term but decided that I will not need to explain to the reader that, by simply stating the term, its absurdity is already evident. It reminds me of a passage in Mahmoud Darwish’s book Journal of an Ordinary Grief (1973) where, when Darwish is reminded of the law, he replies: “Gentlemen, now that I understand the law, I want to make a dangerous confession. I swim in the sea every day, which belongs to the State of Israel and not the city of Haifa, and I do not have a permit to enter the sea. I have another confession as well: I enjoy the weather in the city of Haifa, and the weather belongs to the State of Israel and not the city of Haifa. I do not have a permit to enter the weather because the sky I see above me does not belong to Haifa, and I do not have a permit to sit under the sky. Then you ask for a permit to live in the wind, and they smile.”(4)

I think that Raul Balai and Ehsan Fardjadniya’s Edgelanders and We Sell Reality respond to very similar injustices. The establishment of the We Sell Reality collective is indebted to the larger We Are Here initiative, a group of ‘undocumented’ refugees and artists based in the Netherlands, who started to self-organize in 2012< # > to confront the mind-boggling challenges of those who are “undocumented.” Unlike “documented” refugees, they do not receive shelter, but they are also not allowed to work, which makes it almost impossible for people who fall into this group to sustain themselves. Through the We Are Here initiative, members were able to turn their forced invisibility into active campaigning and take matters into their own hands by squatting around 50 empty buildings in Amsterdam during a period of six years. Their impressive collective force was eventually exhausted by evictions and deportations. They decided to split into smaller groups to be more flexible and self-sustainable. This is how We Sell Reality started, in continuation of the activism of We Are Here, trying out different strategies and forms of resistance and survival. They are now an “open” cooperative of around fifteen members who create products, installations, and interventions in public spaces and art institutions, “with the aim of providing insight into the lives of undocumented refugees.” 

The artist duo Raul Balai and Ehsan Fardjadniya and the collective We Sell Reality are both calling for action, in reaction to a violation of human rights; the right to housing features strongly in their respective projects. Human rights provide a loophole for undocumented refugees—that is how the BBB policy came into being. Yet, the law alone cannot force governments to implement human rights, nor hinder other lawmakers’ attempts to reverse or circumvent the policies that protect these rights. In fact, in The Right to Dominate (2015), Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini point out that the language of human rights is often applied selectively, justifying intervention or control by powerful actors while overlooking violations committed by those same actors. They also discuss how the human rights rhetoric can be manipulated to justify actions that serve political or economic interests rather than genuinely promoting justice and dignity for all.(5) In his review of their book, James Eastwood writes: “Perugini and Gordon provide a convincing demolition of the idea that human rights stand above politics, and that they always work in defense of the oppressed. Instead, the authors call on us to recognize the inevitably political nature of human rights-based mobilizations. However, this is not in order to discredit human rights altogether, but rather to make more effective use of them.”(6)

Both projects, Edgelanders and We Sell Reality, engender a critique and a political mobilization of the law through their work. Raul Balai and Ehsan Fardjadniya will take it upon themselves to enact the fictitious lawsuit against the city, in a performance due to happen at a later stage of the project at Podium Mozaïek; a process whereby they end up with a quasi “people’s tribunal” suing the municipality for its neglectfulness in implementing the BBB policy. I sense a distrust for the law and human rights discourse in these projects, but they also seem strongly dependent on it. 

You asked me in your response to my e-mail, Imara, whether I could describe how Raul Balai and Ehsan Fardjadniya appeal to the morality of their audience/participants in their performances, and whether I could address how we are all implicated in these issues. One detail I forgot to add is that, at Podium Mozaïek, they also install a large number of one-liners about refugees published in the media, in which racist and nationalist language is used. In a sense, they show the context to which we, as an audience, contribute by allowing it to happen. 

In a published correspondence between Ehsan Fardjadniya and journalist Yaghoub Sharhani, in which they write letters to each other about the experience of being in exile,(7) Ehsan offers a small anecdote about editing a video he shot in 2014. Mercedes Zandwijken had commissioned him to film the Keti Koti Dialogue Table at the slavery monument in Oosterpark. While editing, he came across a dark-skinned man who was constantly disrupting the scene while getting free snacks from the bar. Ehsan found himself ​​disgruntled at the guy “of a certain nationality” who “always come for the free food and are not interested in the content.” Ehsan zoomed in​,​ only to discover that ​​​​the man in the video recording he was annoyed with was in fact himself. This intelligent anecdote is somewhat of an antidote toward ethical righteousness. It is Ehsan’s way of telling us: racism is structural, it can infect us all, regardless of what we look like. We are all implicated.

However, how to tackle this sense of responsibility is another thing. As a “migrant” myself, I find it astonishing how many people here trust the city government, the law, and the police to take the responsibility of mediating relationships between the citizens instead of forming direct relationships with each other and finding solutions themselves. This trust and reliance on the law becomes problematic at times, precisely because the law does not stand above politics.(8) We must be able to demand justice outside legal institutions. That is why I think the form of the re-enactment and future enactment of trials in the Edgelanders project gives us agency as a grassroots-based demand for justice, very similar to people’s tribunals. It also helps in bringing together people with similar values, creating a collective sense of community beyond the limiting framework of “documented citizenship.” 

Today, ​​​​Elke Uitentuis, a Dutch member of We Sell Reality, sent me a great voice message about their project for the Amsterdam Museum. I was under the impression that We Sell Reality was mostly going to present the subversive merchandise they had been working on previously. However, the presentation also involves a series of commemorations, or rather what they call “memorials,” which are born out of a conversation among the members of the collective about different traditions of gathering and commemoration. The memorials provide different perspectives on shared experiences of loss and remembrance. The first memorial, at Framer Framed, led by Sudanese members of We Sell Reality, will be mourning friends and family in Sudan and elaborates on how to help from a distance. It will involve collective praying, discussions, and sharing food. At the same time, a dinner will take place at a border town in Sudan. The second memorial, initiated by Ethiopian members, will spotlight those displaced from their homes and lands due to power struggles among tribes in Ethiopia and Eritrea. This memorial, at Sexyland World, seeks to find common ground between Ethiopia and Eritrea’s diverse tribal traditions, despite tensions, and will feature a more lavish setting with speeches, cultural symbols, and shared rituals. The third event, at the Amsterdam Museum will be a memorial around the history of slavery and the recent drowning of migrants at sea. It will include eclectic rituals that combine various cultural backgrounds. A record in the form of video documentation of each memorial will also be presented at the Amsterdam Museum. The members of the collective leading each memorial will involve their respective communities and collaborate with the rest of the We Sell Reality team to bring the commemorations to life.

I was thinking for a few days about the memorials, and as to why We Sell Reality will enact them, and I think it stems from loneliness. You see, I constantly feel like I live in two parallel worlds here, one filled with violence and injustice and the other with the banality of the everyday. I constantly feel that there’s no one to speak to about what is going on in Palestine. Community is extremely important in times of crisis, as not only can one share one’s grief, but it is also crucial to keep the story alive. In a 1986 public conversation between Salman Rushdie and Edward Said at ICA in London, the former asked the latter where he starts when being asked about the Palestinian story.(9) He responded: “The interesting thing is that there seems to be nothing in the world which sustains the story: unless you go on telling it, it will just drop and disappear.” In sharing and remembering, one can invite other communities in. 

Another very important aspect of the memorials is that they are shared as an art form: ritual (whether religious or secular) is reclaimed as a form of (contemporary) art, and vice versa. I also think that it is extremely powerful that the ones deemed “undocumented” enact remembrance for those who drowned at sea recently as well as for the enslaved who in the past were shipped overseas. They are taking agency and doing the work which we should all be doing together, commemorating and celebrating lives. I cannot help but think of Saidiya Hartman's method of creating counter-memories, which she calls “Critical Fabulation.” It is centered around alternative narratives that challenge dominant historical accounts. She writes about how marginalized communities create counter-memories to resist erasure and reclaim their agency in shaping their own histories.(10)

This agency tied to producing new narratives and changing unjust conditions is present in both projects. I see them as an invitation to think and practice together in an artistic form, taking the shape of an affirmative critique of human rights and a breeding ground for alternative stories and realities.

Many salams from sunny Amsterdam,

Lara 

Khaldi is artistic director at de Appel, and works as a curator, artist, writer, and educator..

Footnotes 
1. This letter is addressed to Imara Limon, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Amsterdam Museum. She invited me to contribute an essay to the project Refresh Amsterdam ​​#2: War & Conflict. 
2. See, for example, bell hooks’ work on positionality in understanding power dynamics: hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York City, NY: Routledge, 1994.
3. In this context, BBB does not refer to the farmer’s party (BoerBurgerBeweging).
4. Darwish, Mahmoud.. Journal of an Ordinary Grief. New York City, NY: Archipelago​​: (1973) 2012, p. 76. 
5. Perugini, Nicola and Gordon, Neve. The Human Right to Dominate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
6. Eastwood, A. J. “Perugini and Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate.” Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 46, no.2, 2017. Accessed through:https://www.palestine-studies...., retrieved August 21, 2023. 
7. Fardjadniya, Ehsan and Sharhani. Yaghoub. “Briefwisseling: Mensen uit meerdere stukjes – Op z’n Nederlands de gordijnen openen.” De Groene Amsterdammer, no. 17-18, April 26 2023. Accessed through:https://www.groene.nl/artikel/..., retrieved August 21, 2023. 
8. The Dutch legal system often operates under the assumption of colorblindness—the idea that race should not be a factor in legal decisions. However, this colorblind approach can lead to the denial of systemic racism and its historical underpinnings. By ignoring the influence of race and colonial history, the legal system may fail to address the structural inequalities that disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities.
9. Said, E. and Rushdie, S. [1986]. London: ICA. Accessed through https://www.youtube.com/watch?..., retrieved August 21, 2023.​ ​ 
10. See for example: Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12, no.2), 2008, p. 1-14.