Stasis Echoes (2025)

Collaboration with Alexandra Belokon

Hosted by Zirka in Munich

Stasis Echoes unfolds within a space reframed as a state of exception, a zone where bureaucratic systems suspend migrant subjects in conditions of indefinite delay and control, outside ordinary judicial limits.

Drawing on Agamben’s theory and Foucault’s tripartite model of power, the exhibition contends that these mechanisms of suspension are inseparable from capitalist labor dynamics. The migrant’s purposefully designed place in bureaucracy reflects the logic of a reserve army of labor: a contingent workforce segmented and pitted against itself, a mechanism that suppresses wages and enforces precarity.

The Aquarium becomes a liminal site where these forces resonate rather than resolve. Printed works stage fragments of power: from subtle exclusion from a German birthday tradition, exposing how cultural norms function as tools of biopower; to the disciplinary demands of integration courses; to the constricted imaginaries of ‘low skill’ labor encoded in professional language texts and citizenship tests.

At the aquarium’s center, an aluminium sphere houses a suspended speaker playing the first movement of Hans Werner Henze’s Tristan. This work, itself critically unsettling Wagner’s romantic and nationalistic legacy, is transformed here, its speed and pitch modulated by the amplitude of the Ausländerbehörde phone menu. This modulation recalls the barrel organ: an instrument historically tied to street performers classified as unskilled, mechanically producing a predetermined tune not of its own making, symbolizing the loss of agency.*

In the corner, an acid-etched Bundesadler plate outfitted with an exciter triggers the bureaucratic waiting tone at random intervals. Shaped by principles of sonic warfare, and the notion of acoustic surveillance, the sound turns the state symbol into a vibrating, tactile surface; it serves to instill a latent control and ambient unease embedded in bureaucratic time.

Together, these works reveal how bureaucratic power intricately shapes the migrant experience, intersecting with legal frameworks, labor conditions, and cultural practices, revealing the subtle yet pervasive forces that govern belonging and exclusion.

*On-site audio sample recorded while exploring the Aquarium.

Documentation: Diogo Frazão