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Paper short abstract

Using theatre as a research method, the visa system becomes tangible as an assemblage of diverse actors. The performance Vis-à-Vis(a) intervenes in the politics of (in)visibility by revealing relations, actors, and affects often obscured in Europe’s border regime.

Paper long abstract

Europe’s border regime and in particular the 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 solely a matter of critique. In the international theatre project Vis-à-Vis(a), the Schengen visa system itself is narrative and plot. It displays the embodied experiences of applicants, the procedural infrastructures of decision-making, and what we here call, the “spect-actors” (Boal, 2019), whose presence and responses reveal their own relational positioning within the border regime. By “caring for” the visa system through theatre as a method, this article traces how neglected actors, relations and affects participate in its ongoing becoming.