This article examines the conditions and expressions of how refugees in Denmark become citizens. Through visual and collaborative ethnographic fieldwork, which took place during 2017, the case study follows the everyday life of an Eritrean community living in a former retirement home in the town of Hørsholm. The article investigates how becoming citizen can be understood as mediatised, spatial and expressive negotiations between the refugees and the local society. We look at the conditions of becoming citizen through the local framing of the Eritrean community—understood as political, social, cultural and material framing conditions. We draw on Engin Isin’s concept of performative citizenship (Isin, 2017), and we suggest how everyday life and becoming potentially hold the capacity to re-formulate and add to the understanding of citizenship. We suggest that becoming citizen is not merely about obtaining Danish citizenship and civic rights nor tantamount with settling down. On the contrary, the analysis shows that becoming citizen is a process of expressed and performed desires connected to global becomings beyond the sedentary citizenship, and therefore holds capacity for transforming and diversifying the notion of citizenship.
A collection of five video essays on embodiment and social distancing, with a focus on performances. ELLEN KRESS, "Rest is Resistance: Embodied Reflections of the Retraction Period in the Creative Process" (00:10): This video essay contemplates the role that rest performs in my own creativity, connecting the labor movement, technology and the radical act of restorative rest. LASSE MOURITZEN AND KRISTINE SAMSON, "Pandemic Encounters" (05:34): As social distance became a daily routine, urban lives changed into sites of strange encounters, negotiating proximity and presence anew. JOSIAH PEARSALL, "I All Occur Within Arm's Reach" (10:24): This video performance from April and May 2020 explores my embodied position in an isolated and constrained world; my world exists within the frame of a desk and a computer. SHABARI RAO, "Nothing to Show" (15:45): We are constantly redrawing and rediscovering our sense of self through feedback (intended and unintended) that we receive through physically sharing space with different people in a variety of environments. With social distancing, that range of environments is severely and suddenly restricted. What happens to my sense of self in these circumstances? How do I know who I am? What do I have to show the world and my self to confirm my sense of self? CHARLOTTA RUTH, "What is liveness and what can it be?" (19:59): Rethinking Alfred Schütz's essay "On multiple realities" for online to offline existence.
This essay is a collective investigation of affective experience, bewilderment, and imagery during the COVID-19 situation in Copenhagen, Denmark through multivocal writing and filmmaking. By letting go of the promises of normality, both in thinking and creating, the writers explore various personal, academic, and aesthetic states of affect—hope, despair, desire, and frustration, like temporary landscapes or glimpses of a new world. Feeding on boredom and fear of being isolated, left inactive and frustrated, naive, or hopeful, this essay points into a different and shivering set of changes, personal and societal, that we are currently facing, and illustrates how such changes, full of pain or despair, might also open new becomings of desire and hope.
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