Abstract
Abstract: This essay explores the performance series Simple as ABC (2016 - ongoing) by Belgian film and theatre director and activist Thomas Bellinck as an exemplary artistic reflection on border regimes and the technological apparatus of mobility management. Based on extensive research into the most acute forms of human-hunting today, the mechanisms of border control and migration, Bellinck claims the speculative documentary as a counter-genre to “documentary taxidermy.” The speculative documentary investigates the objectification and de-humanization of the Other as an undesirable data-subject by interrelating the ethics of the “sovereign” gaze and looking-from-above management with the looking-from-below perspective of criminalized bodies and borderland communities. By questioning the interweaving of documentary forms with hegemonic representations of the Other, I argue that statements of truth in documentary theatre need to become unsettled, so that the genre avoids becoming complicit in the solidification of essentialist identity politics and the regulative production of narrative protocols.
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