You can speak freely
This performance is closely based on the transcript of an official interview conducted in late 2017 between a client and an officer from the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND). Portions of this interview have been reworked into an operatic form. Language plays a central role in critiquing colonial power structures. Bureaucratic language—especially within state systems of control—often functions as a tool of exclusion, reducing complex lived experiences to impersonal data.
I examined twenty-four pages of interview transcripts documenting my experience facing the Dutch authorities. In this process, they ultimately decide whether I am eligible to receive the rights that the state says it provides for people, or that I will be excluded from their society and its ‘freedoms.’ In my experience, their judgement is made regardless of the risks to my own safety. The transcripts reveal how the process is filled with intrusive, private, and often traumatic questions, asked without the provision of a safe or compassionate space in which to answer them.
The interview was conducted in Dutch, simultaneously translated into Pashto by an interpreter, and transcribed in real time. Later, the transcript was translated into English using Google Translate.
The exchange with the authorities is here expanded into a live opera performance. The performance exposes the repetitive and invasive nature of these interviews. By staging the interview transcripts in an operatic format, I try to decontextualize the rigid institutional language of the procedure and give it another life and rhythm, full of the emotional depth of opera. It is, for me, a kind of healing or coming to terms with aggression.
As a form historically associated with Western power and cultural dominance, the institutional authority of opera is partly undone, becoming a critical site for challenging dominant narratives. This creates a layered experience—one that shifts between beauty and discomfort and draws attention to the contradictions embedded in state systems. Through this work, I seek to reframe bureaucratic language: not as a neutral or passive structure, but as an active force that shapes human lives and carries its own violence. I aim to reposition those subjected to its language —not as passive victims of interrogation, but as individuals with agency, dignity, and resilience.
Credits
The work is a collaboration between:
Malina Suliman: Text author, project leader, artist, librettist
Composer, librettist: Martin Lissel
Repetiteur, piano: Ludvig Nilsson
Singers: Linda Evers, Lovisa Wahlund Ferm, Mea Sethson and Saga Fribyter
Supervision: Charles Esche
Dramaturgical support: Andrew Hardwidge
Light support: Jimmy Svensson
Assistant stage director: Tessan-Maria Lehmussaari
Electronic music: Jacob Klang
Video and image: Malina Suliman
Creation Support: SKH subject areas of dance and opera
Biography
Born in Afghanistan, Malina Suliman has lived in exile for over a decade. She received her MA from the Dutch Art Institute in 2015. In 2017, she was awarded the Artist Protection Fund, which enabled a scholarship at the Van Abbe Museum. In 2024, she joined a Residency at JVE in Maastricht.
Her artistic practice explores urban space as a place of mobility, displacement, and diasporic flows - of people, knowledge, and cultural artifacts. Acknowledging these movements and tensions, her work questions the constructed nature of culture and offers a critical lens on multicultural contexts. By juxtaposing the exiles' collective and fragmented identities, she opens up a space for dialogue that connects experiences across borders and languages.
Working through conceptual, performative, and research processes, her practice functions as a tool for social and political critique. It deals with mechanisms of exclusion and inequality, examining the hierarchies of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and citizenship that shape everyday life. Essentially, her work raises pressing questions about belonging, survival, and origins - while imagining possibilities for joint action and a future of collaboration.
