Edgelanders: interview met Ehsan Fardjadniya en Raul Balai

Between April 13 and June 4, 2024, de Appel will present the video installation Edgelanders: Amsterdam on Trial / Part III: The Witnesses, as part of a larger project by artists Ehsan Fardjadniya and Raul Balai. In conversation, the artists talk more about their collaboration, the previous two parts of the project and what they are planning in the future.

How did the Edgelanders project come about?
Raul: Two years ago I was approached by graphic workspace AGA Lab and Podium Mozaïek, asking if I wanted to participate in an international project between different graphic studios, focusing on artists with a migrant or refugee background. I found it curious that migrants and refugees were placed in the same category for this project. A recent refugee and a second-generation migrant have very different stories and positions in society. I invited Ehsan to participate, partly because of our different backgrounds: I was born and raised in Amsterdam as a second-generation migrant, and Ehsan came to the Netherlands in 2000 as a political refugee from Iran.

Ehsan: In 2019, a few years before Edgelanders, I organized a similar project, Refugee On Trial: an interactive performance in which a judge and lawyers were the performers, and the audience was invited to think critically about the label ‘refugee’. The Edgelanders project has a similar premise. For the first chapter, The Background, we had built an installation at Amsterdam Museum as part of the group exhibition Refresh #2: War & Conflict. Refresh Amsterdam is a biennial, interdisciplinary event around Amsterdam’s urban culture. This second edition was organized together with more than twenty cultural institutions in this city, with the collective We Sell Reality, emerged from the squatter-activists We Are Here, as the main partner.

Lara Khaldi, artistic director of de Appel, writes in a mail essay published in conjunction with the exhibition at Amsterdam Museum, "In their project Edgelanders, 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.”

Is this situation particular to the city of Amsterdam?
Raul: Amsterdam, and also more broadly taken The Netherlands, is the starting point of this project for a reason: there is a big difference between its image and reality. This city likes to project the image of an open, friendly, all-tolerant municipality, but this is often at odds with reality and the policies that create it. People who are evicted from asylum centers are often advised by staff members to go to Amsterdam, because there is this idea that they can get help here. But here, too, they are often left to their own devices. Because the idea of openness is so intertwined with Dutch identity, there are many blind spots for structural problems.

For the exhibition at Amsterdam Museum, the artists presented a rendering of a timeline in installation form, which tells the story of Souleyman, a friend of Ehsan and Raul who came to the Netherlands as a 16-year-old, and still didn’t acquire residence documents. The five-meter-long timeline showed the uncertain, suffocating existence of someone caught up in an inhuman and Kafkaesque system. The timeline's basic material is canvas, which is used in refugee camps as well as to shield construction sites. The material therefore refers to both shelter and temporality. The second part of the installation presents an interview with human rights lawyer Pim Fischer, representative of We Are Here, among others, who sued the Dutch state at the European level and won the case: the state had to provide shelter to undocumented people. This is where the Bed-bath-bread scheme came into being.

Ehsan: In practice, the Dutch state came up with all kinds of obstacles to this support; it turned out that it was not unconditional at all. For example, undocumented migrants seeking shelter had to sign a document for their return to their country of origin, which actually turned out to be illegitimate.

Raul: Pim Fischer often uses the metaphor of someone who is drowning. Someone who is in the water and can't swim, you don't ask if that person has a passport, you simply help them, without extra terms. That seems like a clear position to insist on.

How did the Edgelanders-project move from a museal to a theatrical context?
Ehsan: Souleyman, the protagonist of the installation at Amsterdam Museum, has an interest in theater and performance art, and through conversations with him, the second chapter of Edgelanders came into being. Part two, The Hearing, was a kind of performance theater piece in documentary form. No actors on stage, but people telling their own life story. Everything was captured on film, making the camera a device for giving testimony. The piece consisted of a roundtable conversation between Souleyman, Pim Fischer and ourselves.

For Part III, on view at de Appel, the artists invited people who live, or have lived, in shelters to tell their stories in front of the cameras.
Raul: In this part at de Appel, we want to make the project polyphonic. Our indictment of the city is not only about whether shelter is provided, but also how it is provided. Are human rights taken seriously, and do they act from empathy and humanity? When will the local government get more courageous, so that they do more than the bare minimum? I find it wry that while the municipality manages to pass far-reaching environmental measures that restrict the freedom of people in the city, they do not dare to do so when it comes to welcoming people into the city who very much need a place to stay. People without residence documents are in a constant limbo, while allowing someone to work and have a normal social life is much more beneficial for all parties involved.
We tried to bring across these feelings and frustrations in the installation at de Appel. Visitors are led through narrow hallways and stairs up and down before they reach the video installation. The hallway and stairs serve no purpose, just like the seemingly endless processes that undocumented migrants are exposed to. The screens displaying the interviews are mounted to scaffolding, a provisional structure which echoes the temporariness of lives of those living in shelters.

Will the project live on after part III at de Appel?
Ehsan: In 2025, Amsterdam will celebrate its 750th anniversary. The municipality wants to go big, with various cultural events throughout the year. An important PR moment for the city. We want to organize a public tribunal, precisely in that symbolic year, as a critical stance. We will shape this in the coming year, with collaborations with judges and lawyers. The political climate, and the cabinet yet to be formed, will also help determine the shape of the fourth part. For example, the currently biggest political party PVV has promised in their party program to stop the Bed-bath-bread policy.

Raul: The future does not look positive in that regard. Hopefully, at least at the local level, we can create awareness among policy makers and politicians with this project. We need to get rid of the haphazardness and temporariness of residence permits.

You are warmly invited to the opening of the exhibition on Saturday 13 April between 4-8pm.
RSVP recommended: Please RSVP here. Stay tuned for the next chapter of Edgelanders via the website amsterdamontrial.nl.