We Are Here: The Embodiment of an Imagination

Abstract

This is a study to a movement of sans-papiers named We Are Here, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Sans-papiers constantly come across excluding borders: national borders, borders which provide access to citizenship, borders which provide access to social facilities. Moreover, a sans-papiers is imagined and constructed by the state as being deprived from all political influence and ideally lives a pure biological life. The main goals of We Are Here are to make the situation of sans-papiers in The Netherlands visible and to provoke a structural solution for it. To be able to carry out the movement s demands, the group demonstrates frequently. Consequently the movement often becomes a synchronic body that is able to perform its demands and is therefore able to realize its demands and imaginations of a future for a short moment in time. The Dutch state tends to see the situation of its sans-papiers as provisional, whereas We Are Here demands a structural solution: papers. The movement illustrates that the state is not the sole actor in the web of power as it frequently performs political influence. Life as a political struggle turned back against the system which controls it.