Belgium’s Paperless: Lived Precarity in Futureless Paradigms

By European definition, the sans-papier or the undocumented is “a third-country national present on the territory of a Schengen state who does not fulfil, or no longer fulfils, the conditions of entry as set out in the […] Schengen Borders Control” (European Commission 2021). Since the term “sans-papiers/undocumented” offers plenty of rooms for interpretation (i.e. asylum seekers, temporary workers, etc.), this research will interchangeably use “sans-papiers/undocumented” in reference to individuals/groups/communities who do not possess lawful permission to be in a host country because they entered without authorization or have remained beyond the authorized period. Regardless, the definition asserts that the undocumented is present but absent: an entity in limbo, an undefined body, a vague vessel of thought and actions. I experienced the weight of such legal status definition a few weeks after my student visa expired last October 2020 when I decided to stay in Belgium after earning my advanced masters degree. I couldn’t prepare myself for the states of anxiety and uncertainty it put me through – not knowing what to expect, what to look forward to, not being able to normally plan things out given the COVID pandemic, etc. At the same time, knowing some migrant peers in Belgium who are also undocumented encouraged a pondering of my privileged position compared to the sans-papiers/undocumented who came to Belgium on economic/labor purposes. This curiosity shaped my PhD proposal’s research question (and supplementary questions): How do sans-papiers/undocumented communities in Belgium live within the precarities of their status? How do they embody/negotiate/perform within sans-papiers/undocumented frameworks? How do they imagine a “future”? How can sans-papiers’/undocumented communities’ lived/embodied/negotiated imaginaries inform artistic research and performance studies? Additional questions would be: What role does community-led art play in fostering spaces and opportunities to engage with complex topics like migration, citizenship, etc.? Site-wise, how does Belgium respond to “sans-papiers/undocumented” within its governmental underpinnings? This doctoral project will unpack “sans-papiers/undocumented”, ”precarity”, and ”future” through community-led art collaborations/expressions/thinking with each respective community-of-interest. Along with such unpacking, the project will also explore how the artist-researcher will position himself within the framework of community-led art project(s), and how such position can be translated theoretically and methodologically. Ranajit Guha’s (2011) pertinent diaspora-related question inspired an internal brainstorm on where the sans-papier/undocumented are located conceptually: “Who constitutes [the sans-papiers] anyhow? And what is it after all? Is it a place or simply a region of the mind— a mnemic condensation used to form figures of nostalgia out of a vast dispersal? Or is it nothing but the ruse of a beleaguered nationalism to summon to its aid the resources of long-forgotten expatriates in the name of patriotism?” (Ibid: 5) The passage proposes a possibility that the “sans-papiers/undocumented” is an imaginary prescribed to make an outsider believe and curl into the insecurities of their otherness. While sociology and anthropology consider precarity as an ideology which tackles contemporary, neoliberal labour market conditions and as a feature to broader life (e.g. Bourdieu 1998; Dorre et al. 2006; Fantone 2007 acc. to Lewis et al. 2015), these definitions tend to whitewash sans-papiers’ performative and artistic possibilities. Such leads to the clouding of the artistic, theoretic, and practical potentiality of undocumented bodies. As an example, the “un-“ in undocumented or the ”sans-“ in sans-papiers instantaneously suggest negative connotations (i.e. crude, unskilled, and even dangerous). But there is more to the construct of the undocumented that is invisible to the eye: the way in which such specific (group of) people perform, embody, imagine, distort, take advantage of the term – the way such bodies “persist” (Butler 2015). Belgium is a crucial site in this artistic research proposal/project for its role as one of United Nations’ founding members, a hub for humanitarian and corporate organizations, and its complex internal politics – for example not having a fully-working national government for 600 days (Politico 2020). This project will include a theoretical and artistic dialogue ( i.e. conceptual, etc.) with the specific research sites (since the future communities-of-interest will come from different parts of Belgium) to artistically locate and situate the sans-papiers/undocumented – their perceptions, lived experiences, and their continuous “becomings”. I intend to collaborate with undocumented communities in Belgium which will come from (but not limited to): a.) Southeast Asia; b.) Africa; and c.) and an asylum seekers’ community (most of whom come from the Middle East) (note that the target groups come from what contemporary humanities/social sciences call “the Global South”). Dialogue with the site – in the context of this project – will implicate local agencies (i.e. Belgian neighborhoods, institutions, spaces, etc.) as well. This artistic research project departs from the perspective that artistic research is a field of study, not a means nor an output. By critically putting attention to the agencies of the collaborating communities, the project follows Mika Elo’s artistic research (practices): “[…] a nascent set of cultural techniques, […] operative processes of reproducing, handing down, and passing on whatever remains of life: traces, patterns, artefacts” (2017, p. 51). In this process, the researcher is placed along the mediating lines between apparatuses of power and undocumented communities, altogether engaging in an exhaustive yet pertinent collaborative, consented, and community-led project plan to deepen and ”thicken” (Geertz 1973) the artistic and ethnographic materials which, in turn, will apprise future written and artistic outputs. Specifically, the objectives of this doctoral project are: • To arrive at artistic and anthropologic (interdisciplinary) reimagination of different “sans-papiers/undocumented” assumptions, demarcations, and embodiments – as well as the terms’ relationship with the “documented”; • To highlight the “sans-papiers/undocumented” as a lived/embodied/negotiated/performed imaginary and further its possibilities in artistic research and performance studies; • To survey social, political, and cultural implications that the “undocumented” construct is built upon; • To encourage the “undocumented” to explore their agencies and their right to “persist” (Butler 2015); • This is also to survey the actor in the production of identity politics which is the state (in the context of this research, Belgium). The project will depart from an outsiders’ (the undocumented) perspective and how such perspective sees, understands, relates, and negotiates with the adoptive country; and • To stay unprejudiced with the artistic research possibilities and collaborations (including organizations/collectives which work with undocumented migrants) that this project will encounter.