Yentl de Lange, Amade M’charek
Europe’s border regime and in particular its visa procedures come with a politics of visibility and invisibility. What is rendered visible and what remains unseen shapes not only how the visa system operates, but also how questions of mobility, precarity, and life and death are produced. This article experiments with theatre as a research method to attend to these politics of (in)visibility by approaching the visa system as a matter of care rather than critique alone. Rather than representing the visa procedure as a ‘theatre of proof’, the international theatre project Vis-à-Vis(a) mobilised it as a topic and tool for generating new relations and knowledges. The show displays the lived-experiences of applicants, the procedural infrastructures of decision-making, and what we here call, borrowed from Augusto Boal, the ‘spect-actors’, whose presence and responses reveal their own relational positioning within the border regime. By ‘caring for’ the visa system, this article not only traces how neglected actors, relations and affects are implicated in this system. Caring, so we argue, is a mode of paying attention to these neglected things so as to develop the ability to respond, or what Donna Haraway has called ‘response-ability’.