Performing (on) permeable layers of dwelling: B.O.D.Y. The Bureau of Domestic Yearning

The migration crisis and the anxieties brought about by the global COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated the instability and unpredictability of how we dwell in places. These phenomena force us to rethink “space,” our relationship with it, and thus, ourselves as in-placed subjects. This article reflects on my performance of B.O.D.Y. The Bureau of Domestic Yearning. It is a personal response to living in lockdown in a country that is both domestic and foreign to me because I am an expat. Performing at home has led me to question where home is in relation to my resident status (visa) and my body as two dimensions that often do not match. The borders determining physical environments and bureaucratic landscapes overlap imperfectly, revealing cracks and divergencies, in which my expat sōma dwells by performing multiple identities, none of which is exhaustive of myself. I yearn for belonging to what surrounds me at the point of vanishing—or have I finally become one with the land on which I stand? My paper shows how I get acquainted with my domestic space by using my body as measurement. This helped me find out, eventually, that it is not a tool but my very first domestic space, which I always inhabit and through which I perform on various visas and frontiers, on the ground upon which I stand, as well as in the atmospheric pressure of bureaucracy. My migrant body is a horizon: a mobile point of contact between dimensions.