Publication

This text contains sentences in Arabic. They are not translated. This is not an omission. It is a methodological decision. If you read these sentences and do not understand them, you are experiencing, on a reduced scale, what this work describes: the moment a reading system encounters something it cannot classify. What you feel in that moment—whether frustration, curiosity, the impulse to read on, or the impulse to skip the line—is not a side effect. It is a data point. The Arabic sentences are not decoration and not a gesture of identity politics. They are epistemic anchors: points in the German text where the self-evidence of German as the ultimate arbiter of conceptual order is interrupted. You do not need to understand them. You only need to register what happens in your body when you encounter them. This is already Embodied Listening.

The security personnel of the Grassi Museum ran. Not because there was danger, but because a body refused to fit into the expected form. It sang in Arabic and Sesotho, stood still where movement was expected, wore a formal suit where a different appearance would have been anticipated. The institution responded with its deepest reflex: to return the body to a manageable register.

2018:⁵ these are not escalations out of nowhere. These are expressions of a politics of legibility that marks the non-German body as structurally unsuitable. To research in this space does not mean choosing a difficult context. It means researching in a context that makes visible the mechanisms of the Architecture of Appearance with a density and speed that would be more diffuse elsewhere. Saxony is not a special case, it is a condensation space. The research question arises from this structural repeatability: How can embodied artistic practices act as epistemic interventions by not describing the Architecture of Appearance from the outside, but sabotaging it from within? And how does the body reposition itself in this process: from classified object to operative subject of knowledge? The body posing this question has a history that is methodologically relevant, not biographically decorative. Participation in protests and incarceration in 2011 produced a carceral epistemology⁶: power inscribed itself not as a concept, but as a technology of enclosure, control, and rendering legible into the body. This sensorium later registered, in Saxony, in German institutions, the same logic in its gentle form: authorities managing origin; museums exhibiting alterity; algorithms reducing bodies to usable data points. The migration between Kuwait, As-Suwaida, and Germany in this context is not a life story; it is the sequence of different orders of legibility through which the same body was always re-coded, tested, and classified.

principle that distinguishes ECL from mere critique: not the rejection of the normative code, but its overfulfillment to the point of the opponent's forced illiteracy. Methodologically, the work follows a three-stage logic – diagnosis, interruption, reconfiguration – in the mode of critical autoethnography and performative dispositif analysis. These three stages are not analytical categories. They are forms of execution: the experiences with institutional marking in Saxony are not an illustration of already established theories; they are the primary evidentiary register, those micrological forms of violence that disappear in universalistic descriptions and become visible only through a body that is not entirely absorbed by the order it analyzes.

These concepts are not definitions; they are tools. Their function is not to name phenomena, but to clarify mechanisms. Those who read them should not learn them, but be able to operate with them. Therefore, each concept begins not with its meaning, but with the moment it becomes visible. The form asks for “actual” origin. The display case shows the body without its name. The algorithm prioritizes the profile that reacts quickly and is cleanly categorizable. These three operations are not accidentally similar; they share an infrastructure.

Decolonial Opacity: In the Grassi, I sang in Arabic. Not to be understood, but to not have to be fully understood. The untranslatability was not a communication breakdown. It was the message. Decolonial Opacity⁹ refers, in alignment with Édouard Glissant’s right to opacity, to the strategic refusal of full transparency towards colonial and algorithmic regimes of visibility. Opacity here is not an absence of meaning, but its sovereign management: the conscious withdrawal from the compulsion for complete legibility, the protection of the body's multifaceted nature from epistemic extraction. In the ECL, opacity operates not as withdrawal, but as intervention: It forces the system to operate at the limits of its own encoding capacity¹⁰.

self-certainty nor by external standardization, but by the conditions of their reading: the Assembly as a site of shared legibility, the methodical protocol as a form of their recording, and explicit reflection on competing hypotheses as a safeguard against self-confirmation. This determination deliberately forgoes any claim to forensic probative value. Forensics belongs to those regimes of knowledge whose operative logic this work specifically criticizes¹²: It produces truth by converting the body into standardized, legally usable units – precisely the form against which ECL as a practice operates. The claim of the ECL is therefore not forensic, but body-phenomenological in a decolonial application: The body testifies to what institutional standardization systematically excludes, and this testimony unfolds its validity not despite, but because of its untranslatability into the language of forensics.

Contextual selectivity (with reservation): The marker appears predominantly in institutional constellations of specific power asymmetry and occurs in contexts with more symmetrical power relations with lower intensity or different quality. The condition is not its complete absence – which would be an unrealistic demand given carceral epistemology and the pervasive asymmetry of social spaces – but an intersubjectively comprehensible difference in intensity, duration, or accompanying phenomena.

Structural repeatability: The marker repeats itself in structurally similar institutional encounters in different places and at different times. This repetition does not prove institutional causality in the strict sense, but it makes it the most plausible among competing hypotheses, provided alternative explanations have been seriously considered.

Shared readability in the Assembly: The marker is not only introspectively accessible, but is also recognized in the Assembly by other bodies with comparable calibration. This shared readability replaces the demand for objective measurement with the demand for collective plausibilization – a procedure that is no less rigorous than measurement, but different in nature: It does not test conformity with an external standard, but the convergence of situated perceptions. Where these three conditions converge, the somatic marker is considered an analyzable unit within the ECL protocol, not as proof, but as a plausibilized form of testimony. Where a condition is missing, it remains noted as an open hypothesis. This protocol prevents the two symmetrical risks of any embodied method: the pathologization of every marker as a private sensation and the unquestioned claim to probative value of every perception.

Uncoded Presence: Sometimes the most effective intervention is mere presence: a body in a space not intended for it, neither asking for permission nor offering an explanation. The irritation that arises is the event. Uncoded Presence refers to a form of remaining in space that resists algorithmic formatting and digital fixation, not through absence, but through tenacious presence in a form that the system cannot convert. It blocks the translation of being into exploitable signals and forces institutions and algorithms to operate at their own coding limits. Uncoded Presence is not a stance of refusal; it is a sovereign occupation of space beyond the conditions that the dispositif prescribes for appearance.

Its function is not the elimination of dissent, but its structured negotiation: It serves to endure epistemic difference, explicitly name power asymmetries, and make the unequal distribution of vulnerability the starting point for knowledge production, rather than leveling it. The agonistic space is thus the institutional counter-model to the liberal fiction of harmonious neutrality.

of the sensory instrument of knowledge, in which truth is physically produced. At-Tamakkun: I spoke High German. I knew the institutional codes more precisely than expected. The irritation in the eyes of my counterpart was not admiration; it was the failure of an expectation. That is At-Tamakkun. At-Tamakkun denotes an act of sovereign appropriation that not only fulfills institutional horizons of expectation but shifts them from within through strategic overfulfillment. At-Tamakkun does not function as an assimilation strategy but as tactical hyper-compliance: a controlled overfulfillment of institutional codes that forces the system to its own epistemic limits and induces strategic illiteracy in the hegemonic counterpart: The system can read the code but no longer dispose of it unconditionally. The sovereignty of this concept lies in mastering the code precisely enough to turn its interpretive authority against itself. At-Tamakkun is therefore untranslatable. However, a danger must be named here, which structurally accompanies every infiltration strategy. At a certain moment, in a certain office, after a certain successful conversation, a question arose that had not been expected: Was this still strategy? Or was it already conviction? The high language, the formal suit, the precise knowledge of the rules of procedure – at one point it was no longer clear whether the code was being performed or believed. This ambiguity is the boundary between At-Tamakkun and assimilation.

When the body continues to register the difference between performance and conviction—as a somatic marker, as a quiet tension, as the slight unease that remains even when everything runs smoothly.

When the goal of infiltration is time-limited and concretely defined, not belonging, but achieving a specific purpose.

And when a space exists outside the institution where the body can encounter itself without coding constraints: The Assembly as a counterweight to institutional infiltration. If these three conditions cease to apply, At-Tamakkun becomes what it operates against: the voluntary transfer of the body into a manageable register. Bhabha described this danger as mimicry: “almost the same but not quite”. The difference to ECL is crucial: mimicry in Bhabha is involuntary and incomplete. At-Tamakkun

Forced Archiving: The frantic running of security personnel at the Grassi was not a security protocol; it was an archiving attempt: to rematerialize the opaque body into a manageable register before it further destabilized the system. Forced Archiving refers to institutions' attempts, from museums to digital platforms, to re-incorporate a dissident or opaque body into a manageable register. It is not merely a retrospective capture, but the violent production of an algorithmically compatible surrogate, a digital double, that circulates faster

ler, Judith: Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge 1993, pp. 2–15. than the material presence of the body itself and henceforth pre-structures the conditions of its appearance. Reverse Forced Archiving refers to the sovereign act of knowledge production.

This work does not research embodied experience; it researches through it¹⁵. The difference is not rhetorical. It is methodologically constitutive. Critical autoethnography is not understood here as self-representation but as a structured practice of knowledge production that uses the body as the primary research instrument. This means concretely: The encounters with institutions in Saxony between 2015 and 2025—authorities, museums, educational institutions, digital platforms—were not subsequently used as illustrations of an already established theory. They were treated as a primary evidence register from which theoretical categories were first developed. The per-

formative dispositif analysis complements this approach: the dispositif is not merely described; it is analyzed in its execution. The performances in the Grassi Museum, the workshops, the Assembly formats are not applications of theory. They are cognitive procedures¹⁶: the body provokes the system to execute its logic, and analyzes this form of execution at the moment of its appearance. Three methodological principles structure the entire work:

Theory follows experience, not the other way around. The theoretical categories Architecture of Appearance, Body as Glitch, At-Tamakkun did not emerge as a deductive application of existing concepts. They emerged as a condensation of recurring somatic and institutional patterns, which were only subsequently brought into dialogue with the theoretical canon.

Failure is productive¹⁷. Moments in which ECL practice did not work, in which the body did not produce expected markers, in which The Assembly did not generate collective knowledge, in which At-Tamakkun threatened to slip into assimilation, are not omitted. They are treated as correctives that sharpen the theory instead of confirming it.

Language is part of the method. The alternation between German and Arabic in this text is not a stylistic decision. It performs, at the level of language, the same operation that ECL performs at the level of the body: the interruption of the self-evidence of the hegemonic code from within.¹⁸

Any research that works with living bodies and the lived experiences of others carries an ethical responsibility that cannot be reduced to informed consent. This work operates with three ethical principles:

• No retraumatization as knowledge production¹⁹: The Assembly and the workshops were designed to collect bodily testimonies without exposing participants again to the conditions that generated these testimonies. The Safer Space is not a mere assertion of protection; it is a methodological requirement.

• Anonymization without invisibility: The individuals whose experiences have informed this work do not appear as data. Where names are not mentioned, this is done at express request – not to depersonalize the experiences, but to leave control over one’s own history with those affected.

• One’s own exposure as a condition: This work demands exposure, somatic visibility, and participation in formats that include vulnerability from other bodies. This demand is only legitimate if the researching body itself is exposed. The biographical situatedness of this work is therefore not a concession to subjectivity; it is the ethical prerequisite for being allowed to demand the same from others.²⁰

A methodological precision is unavoidable here: Not every physical marker is methodologically usable. The difference between a private sensation and a situated indicator does not lie in the feeling itself, but in its repetition structure and in the conditions of its collective readability. ECL operates with a three-stage readability protocol that determines the boundary between subjective experience and plausibilized situated indication:

Stage 1 Contextual Difference: The somatic marker appears in its specific configuration (intensity, duration, accompanying phenomena) predominantly in institutional constellations of specific power asymmetry. A comparable bodily reaction in a more power-symmetrical context does not automatically invalidate the hypothesis, but it requires a differentiation of the configuration: What distinguishes this marker here from that one there? Where no difference can be shown, the marker remains anecdotal.

Stage 2 Serial Repeatability: The marker repeats itself in structurally similar encounters, regardless of geographical location, time of day, or initial affective state. This repetition does not establish institutional causality in a strict sense, but it makes the institutional explanation the most plausible among competing hypotheses, provided that general social anxiety, somatic sediments of past experiences, and self-fulfilling expectations have been seriously examined.

Stage 3 Shared Readability: The marker is not only introspectively accessible but is also recognized in the Assembly by other bodies with comparable calibration. This shared readability replaces the demand for objective measurement with the demand for collective plausibilization. It is no less rigorous than measurement, but differently constituted: It

does not test for agreement with an external standard but for the convergence of situated perceptions.

Only when all three conditions are met is the somatic marker considered an evaluable unit within the ECL protocol. If one condition is missing, the marker is noted as a possible, but not plausibilized, indicator and remains in the somatic journal as an open hypothesis, not as a confirmed reading. These three stages are not a safeguarding strategy against academic skepticism. They are the mechanism that prevents ECL from degenerating into self-affirmation: A protocol that accepts every physical state as an indicator is not a protocol, but propaganda.²¹

Theory in this work is not a roof; it is a floor. Not a protective vault above practice, but the material from which the body operates. The following chapters do not unfold an additive theoretical canon; they construct a web of concepts whose nodes mutually activate each other: body and power, epistemic violence and interpretive authority, embodiment as a form of knowledge, artistic practice as intervention. What follows is not an overview. It is a construction.

There is no knowledge from nowhere²². This statement is not modest, it is precise. The claim of a neutral overview is itself an operation of the Architecture of Appearance: it generates authority by rendering the site of speaking invisible and disguising its own standpoint as a universal form of reason. What passes for objectivity is mostly the voice that does not need to explain its origin.²³

This work explains it. Not as a confession, but as a methodical instrument. Kuwait, As-Suwaida, Germany. These three places are not stages of life; they are three different orders of legibility, through which the same body was continually re-coded, scrutinized, and classified. In Kuwait, the body was that of a guest-worker child: administratively tolerated, culturally marked. In As-Suwaida, it was a Druze in a dissolving state: ethnically legible, politically suspect. In Germany, it is a migrant, Arab, Muslim, a body that is continuously scrutinized for its belonging in authorities, educational institutions, and

museums. Each of these orders addressed the body differently; none left it unchanged.

As-Suwaida, July 2025: This date is not a biographical addendum. It serves as proof for the thesis of this work in its most extreme form. What happened in As-Suwaida in July 2025 was not merely physical violence; it was violence preceded by systematic digital pre-formatting. The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic documented for the entire period "elevated levels of hate speech and disinformation, mainly spread through social media"²⁴. Already in April 2025, fabricated videos, falsely portraying a Druze personality attacking the Prophet Mohammed, had triggered sectarian violence in the Damascus suburbs, an infrastructural rehearsal for what was to follow in July. The simulacrum preceded reality and enabled it.²⁵

Female civilians filmed the bodies of the deceased. Not as journalistic documentation. As an anti-simulacrum act: the return of the material body, injured, disfigured, untranslatable, into a regime that had already replaced it with its digital double. In this context, Reverse Forced Archiving does not mean resistance through visibility. It means resistance through unbearableness: The body returns in a form that the system cannot smooth, cannot archive, cannot exploit. Not the image triumphs over the simulacrum, but the ungovernable triumphs over the governable.

This moment should not be read separately from the Saxon context. It is its world-historical extreme: the same fundamental operation, replacing bodies with a manageable double, in its deadliest form. Crucial is not the sum of these experiences, but their structure: they did not create a stable place of arrival. Precisely the experience of never fully dissolving into an order of appearance prevents a false reconciliation with its categories and keeps open the methodical friction from which knowledge is gained. In this horizon, being out-of-place does not signify a deficit. It signifies protection against the assimilation of thought into the order it must critique.

The genealogical narratives of the al-Harfouch family do not appear in this context as proof of origin; they function as a counter-archive. The family's traditional memory of migrations after the collapse of the Ma'rib Dam is not an ornamental deep history. It is a rejection of the "time from nowhere," that fiction of a neutral, linear Historia Universalis, which forces all events into a synchronized grid and treats mobility as a deviation from normalized sedentariness. Against this grid, the genealogical opacity of the family posits a different temporality: stratification from interruption, loss, departure, and return. Origin appears here not as a singular source but as an superimposed relation, and thus as a model for an epistemology that understands contingency not as a problem but as a condition of knowledge.

Shahba (Philippopolis) 2011. Participation in protests and subsequent detention are not biographical digressions in this work; they mark the emergence of a carceral

epistemology.²⁶ Power, at this moment, ceased to be an abstract concept. It was inscribed into the body as a technology of enclosure, control, deprivation, and rendering legible, not as a trauma to be overcome, but as a calibration of an instrument that has operated ever since. This sensorium registers the same logic in its softer form within German institutions: the authority that manages origin. The museum that exhibits otherness. The algorithm that reduces bodies to exploitable data points. Discipline, mis-addressing, and selective accessibility appear not as isolated irritations but as variations of the same order.

Chemnitz, Dresden, Leipzig. This geography is not a random context; it is a laboratory of visibility. In this region, different modes of public perception, institutional address, and social marking condense into a repeatable pattern: glances that register. Distances that open or close. Stuttering interactions at administrative thresholds. Asymmetrical accessibilities disguised as organizational necessities. These data are not subjective; they are the primary evidence register of this work. How this evidence register was specifically maintained is itself a methodical decision, not a neutral procedural question. The somatic diary formed the primary recording instrument²⁷: a small notebook, filled after each institutional contact—not in the evening, not after hours, but within twenty minutes—with three fixed entries: What did the body do, not what did the person say: When exactly did it begin: upon entering, at the first glance, at the first sentence. When did it stop, or whether it stopped.

In addition, body maps were kept: rapid sketches of a body outline, into which places of tension, warmth, numbness, and withdrawal were entered immediately after institutional encounters. This spatial logging makes visible that somatic markers are not diffusely distributed throughout the body; they sediment at specific locations, which over time coalesce into a recognizable topography of institutional violence. Where writing was too slow, a voice recording of a maximum of three minutes replaced the notebook. The voice itself, its tension, its pace, its breaks, is part of the data.²⁸ This form of recording is not a method of introspection. It is a log of the outer surface: what the body registered at its boundary, not what is presumed to be behind it.

Not as an illustration of already established theories, but as those somatic and spatial testimonies where the violence of institutional intelligibility first materializes. The influence of Isabel Lewis’s performative practice methodologically sharpens this approach. Lewis understands the body not as an object of representation, but as a medium of social and epistemic reorganization²⁹. Choreography here does not stand as an aesthetic form alongside theory; it is a condition of knowledge production that transcends ocularcentric regimes. In combination with the biographical situatedness of this work—migration, multilingualism, carceral epistemology, institutional friction in East Germany—a research position emerges that does not describe from the outside but operates from within: a body not completely at home in the architectures it analyzes, and precisely for that reason capable of interrupting their claims to self-evidence. Biographical situatedness is thus the first operation of critique, not its prehistory. It shifts the body from the position of the read object to that of the reading, registering, and intervening subject.³⁰

Haraway’s insistence on situated knowledge forms the methodological premise here: knowledge never speaks from nowhere; it arises in entangled positions of body, power, and history. This work names its position not to apologize. It names it because the precision of the analysis depends on the precision of its situatedness.³¹

At this point, a methodological objection must be anticipated, one that cannot be circumvented but must be directly addressed. The classic objection is: If the body is simultaneously medium, archive, and argument, who then checks the body? Does the epistemic loop

not close in on itself? The honest answer is: the loop is indeed tighter than in deductive research designs³², and this circumstance demands explicit conditions for plausibility, not a defense of closure. ECL therefore operates with three conditions under which the log must be considered to have failed:

Plausibility through difference in control contexts. If the same somatic marker (trembling, shift in breathing, exhaustion) occurs with the same intensity, duration, and quality in structurally comparable but more power-symmetrical situations, for instance, in a private dispute, a demanding but more egalitarian negotiation, or a physically strenuous but non-classifying context, then the thesis of a specific institutional causality cannot be maintained. ECL does not demand complete absence in control contexts—that would be an unrealistic demand given carceral epistemology and the pervasive asymmetry of social spaces—but an intersubjectively comprehensible difference.

Plausibility through external triangulation. The Assembly does not function as a community of confirmation but only as a corrective if, in addition to the protected core space, there exists a second space where voices with different theoretical frameworks, with comparable biographies and divergent interpretations of their experience, or with an institutional insider perspective can contribute their readings. This dual structure—protected core space for consolidation, extended space for triangulation—is not a contradiction to the safer-space principle, but its necessary complement: safety without friction becomes an echo chamber.³³

Plausibility through competing hypotheses. Every somatic marker must be tested against at least three competing explanations: general social anxiety, somatic sediments of prior experiences not related to the current institution, and self-fulfilling expectation. Only when these alternatives do not sufficiently explain the configuration is institutional causality considered the most plausible, not proven.

These three conditions do not fully resolve the problem of the closed loop, as no situated method can fully resolve it. However, they make the log verifiable where it was previously self-confirming. Haraway has clarified this issue: situated knowledge is no less objective than a view from nowhere³⁴, provided it explicates the conditions of its possible plausibility and revision.

The question of location demands further precision that cannot be methodologically avoided. The body that writes this work is a male Arab body. This de-

termination is not self-evident; it is analytically necessary. In the European Architecture of Appearance, the Arab male body carries a specific double coding³⁵: it is simultaneously read as a security risk and as subservient. These two projections contradict each other, and precisely this contradiction generates a particular form of institutional friction. The body that shows too much competence irritates because it disturbs the subservience narrative. The body that shows too little confirms the risk image. There is no correct measure because the problem lies not in the body, but in the insolubility of the projection. At-Tamakkun operates precisely within this contradiction: not as a solution, but as its strategic overfulfillment.

Biographical situatedness includes class affiliation. This body did not enter German institutions without cultural capital; education, multilingualism, and institutional competence were present. This does not fundamentally change the experience of the Architecture of Appearance, but it modulates it.

An Arab body without these resources encounters the same basic structure, but with fewer opportunities to apply At-Tamakkun as a strategy. ECL must name this difference without hierarchizing it: The experience of the body without cultural capital is no less valid as a source of knowledge; it is calibrated differently. This work speaks of a specific body with specific resources. It does not claim universality for this position. The body is not a container. It is not a neutral substratum upon which power leaves its traces. It is the medium through which power first becomes operable, and the medium through which it can be interrupted.

Between Damascus 2011 and Leipzig 2024 lies not only geographical distance, but also a shift in the form of violence. In Damascus, confinement was physical: walls, locks, body control as a direct technique. In Leipzig, the same logic operates through administrative thresholds, institutional addressing, and algorithmic pacing. What has changed is not the fundamental operation, but its surface. The body registers both as variations of the same frequency. This is not a metaphor; this is the operative basis of carceral epistemology as a calibrated medium of perception.

Judith Butler demonstrates that the body is constituted through repeated acts of social norms—not formed once, but continuously emerging through its constant repetition³⁶. Michel Foucault adds the spatial dimension to the temporal: discipline is most effective where the body begins to regulate itself, where the norm no longer needs to be imposed from outside because it has produced rhythm and judgment within the body itself³⁷. This self-regulation is the most hidden form of institutional violence: it is invisible because the body experiences it as its own reaction. Frantz Fanon adds the ontological dimension³⁸.

Colonial spatial arrangements do not only decide who may move where; they decide who may exist as a complete subject.

Space is already divided before the body enters it: what appears as culture, order, danger, or deficit is not a property of the body, but an effect of spatial distribution. The body enters a space that has already determined its meaning. In the current Architecture of Appearance, these three dimensions—performativity, discipline, and spatial ontology—intertwine into an operative unit. The body here becomes a Body as Glitch not solely through conscious decision, but through the structural impossibility of seamlessly integrating into the coding logic of the dispositif. Fatigue, trembling, and disorientation in this framework are not signals of failure; they are the somatic markers of a body operating under the pressure of permanent legibility.

Read as bodily testimony: These markers document not the inner life of the subject, but the operative violence of the institution at the body's frontier. Methodologically, this work reads these somatic condensations with a strategy of Decolonial Opacity: The body is registered, analyzed, and used as a situated indicator, without translating it into complete institutional availability. The body remains both instrument and archive—legible to itself, opaque enough for the regime that wishes to re-archive it.

A theoretical framework that does not name its internal contradictions is not a framework; it is a backdrop. The following tensions are not resolved. They are kept open as productive areas of friction.

Foucault understands the body as a surface upon which power inscribes its codes. Discipline precedes the body, shapes it, produces it. There is no body before the norm, only the body that emerges through normalization. Fanon responds to a different experience: the colonized body is not merely an effect of power; it carries a capacity for resistance that precedes and outlives colonization. The question is not: Who is right? The question is: What body relationship does ECL need? ECL chooses neither Foucault's passive nor Fanon's autonomous body. ECL understands the body as a reactive system, shaped by power and simultaneously capable of registering, storing, and strategically interrupting this formation. The body as a sensory instrument of knowledge

is neither surface nor subject; it is a medium of perception that reads while being read.³⁹

Glissant’s right to opacity demands the right not to be fully understood – the withdrawal from the compulsion for transparency as a sovereign act. Butler’s performativity, on the other hand, demands strategic repetition: resistance arises not through withdrawal, but through a slight shift within repetition. Opacity withdraws. Performativity remains and shifts. At-Tamakkun is ECL’s response to this tension: it operates with both simultaneously. The overfulfillment of the institutional code is Butler's strategic repetition, with Glissant's opacity within. The body repeats the code until the exhaustion of the other party, without revealing its own interiority.

Russell celebrates the glitch as liberating potential, the error in the system as a place of new beginnings, as a queer and decolonial resource. Said warns: representation is not a playing field; it is a field of power where every visibility is simultaneously an exposition and a potential appropriation. Is the glitch liberation or a trap? ECL answers: The glitch is neither liberation nor a trap; it is a methodical indicator. It provokes the system to visibly perform its hidden violence. The Grassi Museum security personnel running is neither a triumph nor a defeat. It is a corporeal testimony.⁴⁰

Power shapes the body – as shown in the previous chapter. What has not yet been shown is that power also decides which forms of bodily knowledge are allowed to count as knowledge. This is a different operation, and it has a different name.

conform to this grid. The universal historian does not find the unity of history; he establishes it. This totalizing narrative conceals the fundamental untranslatability of key cultural concepts, deeply rooted in a particular tradition but presented as universal. This act of establishment is an infrastructural violence: it monopolizes the conditions of legitimate representation and renders the constructedness of this monopolization invisible by presenting it as discovery.

The Other in this work is not an essential content; it is a structural position. A zone within the Architecture of Appearance where difference does not exist as ontologically independent, but as managed asymmetry: observed, classified, translated into visibility – just enough to confirm the centrality of the hegemonic subject.

merely a collection of false images; it is an infrastructure of power that inextricably links knowledge and domination. What is represented becomes controllable. What is controllable may be represented. Algorithmic governmentality updates this infrastructure. The Other is no longer merely excluded; it is mechanically included in monitored surfaces and represented profiles that fragment its complex presence into quantifiable representations. The platform repeats the Savage Slot in real-time: difference is permitted as long as it can be translated into exploitable data patterns.⁴⁶ The performance The T(AA)CHE by Sobukwe Mapefane, Hammam Alawwam, and Adam Harfouch intervenes directly in this logic. The Black and Arab body in the White Cube is not a symbol; it is a disruptive factor: a living stain that tears open the sterile surface of colonial spatial ordering. The white walls suggest universal neutrality; the body refutes this suggestion by its mere presence. And the Sesotho and Arabic languages perform the same operation at the level of meaning: they produce an algorithmic opacity that confronts the Western subject with its own epistemic limitations. Where interpretive authority does not possess the code, it collapses. Non-readability appears at this moment not as a deficiency, but as a resistant resource.

Opacity here functions as a necessary protective technique, preserving the body's multifaceted nature from epistemic extraction and preventing institutional legibility from transforming into a lethal dispositif of individuation and fixation. Personal heritage, the memory of the Ma'rib Dam, the history of the al-Harfouch – all these operate as counter-archives against the linear time of Western institutions. Migration is not a gap in a resume; it is a superior temporality that exposes institutional time as violently truncated. This approach is not a depth of field inaccessible to purely Western epistemology because it is exotic, but because it renders visible the constructedness of universality from a place outside its self-evidence.

Digital platforms do not stabilize the present through visibility alone, but through archival logic; presence must be translated into recognizable signals, standardized formats, and compatible data structures to circulate at all. What reacts quickly, is affectively aroused, and can be cleanly categorized receives an increased probability of appearance. What hesitates, remains contradictory, or eludes immediate decoding, sinks in the regime of algorithmic prioritization. The body may appear only insofar as it can be converted into legible, comparable, and manageable patterns. This logic reiterates the Savage Slot in an updated form. A precise example of this mechanism is the algorithmic content moderation of Arabic-language content on digital platforms. Studies document a systematic suppression of Palestinian and Arab voices on Instagram and Facebook: posts are automatically blocked, accounts are restricted without reason, and Arabic-language hashtags are hidden from search results, while comparable content in other languages remains marketable.⁴⁷ The algorithm does not decide through explicit discrimination, but through the weighting of training data⁴⁸ that structurally codes certain bodies, languages, and forms of expression as risk signals.⁴⁹ This is the Architecture of Appearance in its purest digital form: not overt prohibition, but the silent lowering of the probability of appearance.⁵⁰ Technically, the body may be present; it is merely rendered invisible.⁵¹ Michal B. Ron has precisely elaborated this logic of algorithmic participation using contemporary art as an example. In her analysis of the Likeconomy, she distinguishes between models in which the audience leaves an indexical trace that converts the

multiplicity of participations into quantitative capital, and practices that neither accumulate nor circulate. Ron thus precisely names the difference that ECL enacts at the level of the body: not the generation of marketable markers, but the sovereign refusal of conversion into exploitable signals. The Like Economy is the aesthetic form of the Architecture of Appearance, the Body as Glitch its structural interruption. A point not yet explicitly named: the digital double reaches the institution before the body enters it.⁵²

In the context of digitized asylum procedures, police databases, and algorithmic pre-classifications, the body encounters an instance that already knows it, or believes it knows it. The dossier, the profile, the risk classification: they are not accompanying documents of the body. They are its predecessors. They structure what is perceived before the face has been seen. This creates a new form of impossibility: the body must not only make itself legible, it must correct an image of itself that it does not know and cannot see. Uncoded Presence responds to this problem not through transparency, not through the disclosure of the 'true' body to its digital distortion. It responds through a presence that is so embodied, so temporally extended, and so contradictory that it does not refute the prefabricated image, but overwhelms it. The body that walks slowly. The body that remains silent when speed is expected. The body that responds in Arabic when German is expected. These gestures are not communication malfunctions; they are the return of the material against the simulacrum.

The body does not withdraw; it remains present. But in a form that resists algorithmic formatting: exhausted, multilingual, affectively condensed, contradictory. This presence blocks the conversion of being into exploitable signals and forces the system to operate at the limits of its own encoding capacity.

As-Suwaida, July 2025: There, the platform no longer functioned as a medium of circulation, but as an operational infrastructure for enemy production. Online hate speech, coordinated sectarian calls, and visual disinformation created a prefabricated enemy image that circulated as a digital double faster than any material testimony. The Druze body was reduced to a few deadly markers, transferred into a hyperreality where the simulacrum became more powerful than the body itself. Reverse Forced Archiving was the counter-operation: civilians filmed the bodies of the killed and distributed the recordings not as documentation, but as an anti-simulacrum act. The injured, disfigured, dead body confronted the circulating double and destroyed its claim to speak in its place. The structural connection to the NSU complex is precise: there, too, power operated through the production of a replacement body, a body of suspicion, which circulated bureaucratically and through media faster than the suppressed bodily testimony.

Baudrillard would object: there is no escape from hyperreality through an image that circulates within that hyperreality. The video of the dead body in As-Suwaida circulates on the same platforms as the enemy image. It is filtered, prioritized, lowered by the same algorithm. It produces no anti-simulacrum. It produces another simulacrum – that of the victim mobilizing the opposing side. This is the strongest objection to Reverse Forced Archiving. And it deserves a direct answer.

ECL does not respond at the level of circulation, but at the level of formatability. Baudrillard’s simulacrum presupposes that the sign can be completely decoupled from its referent. The injured, disfigured, dead flesh of a specific body, with a specific name and a specific breath that no longer exists, resists this decoupling not through its symbolic weight, but through its refusal to be compressible. An algorithm can tone down a political term or categorize a face. It can slow the intensity of a body returning in its most unbearable form, but it cannot smooth it out. The uncontainable does not triumph through representation. It triumphs through friction: through the time the system takes to process it, during which it has already been seen. In "Precious Life," Judith Butler does not argue that there is a "real" outside of representation, but that the frames through which a body may appear grievable can break. This is precisely where Reverse Forced Archiving operates: not as a break with reality, but as a break in the frame. The glitch forces the system to enact its own logic of selection. This is not a triumph. It is a window of opportunity. And windows of opportunity are the material from which Reverse Forced Archiving works.⁵³

These registrations do not translate directly into abstract theory; they sediment as bodily traces. Muscle tone, breath shifts, trembling, and vigilance are

In the Grassi Museum, the body trembled. The trembling was the muscular micro-reaction to the disruption of fit between body and institutional classification logic: the moment in which the system could not categorize the body, and the body registered this incapacity of the system. The trembling was not a private reaction; it was a situated indicator. The visualization of epistemic violence occurs through the conscious transfer of structural asymmetries to the physical level. The body registers

and materializes the violence that institutions and algorithms exert, not symbolically, but bodily. Questions about “actual” origin, the repeated marking of linguistic competence as an exception, disadvantages in housing searches or job applications, the reduction of migrant subjects to knowledge of origin: Viewed in isolation, these appear as trivial episodes. In their serial recurrence, they function as bodily testimony that belonging is institutionally managed, and the body is constantly examined for legibility, fit, and deviation. ECL defines seven somatic markers as situated indicators of an embodied methodical protocol:

Trembling is the muscular micro-reaction to the disruption of fit between body and institutional classification logic. It appears at the precise moment of the classification act, not upon entering the space, thereby plausibilizing institutional causality as the most probable among competing hypotheses.

Breath shifting marks those moments of Forced Archiving in which living presence comes under administrative pressure and is to be compressed into a fixable form. Condensation, pauses, shallow breathing: each of these modulations registers the encroachment of an administrative operation on the deep musculature.

Muscle tone sediments institutional encounters as somatic topography. The tension from the 2011 hearing reappears in the professor’s office hours; the shoulder-neck stiffness felt at the government office counter returns in the algorithm interface. Tone is the slow archive that outlasts fast markers.

Exhaustion registers the energetic costs of permanent legibility. Compliance is not a neutral adaptation but a continuous consumption of vital capacity. It is the receipt for the effort required to overfulfill the code without revealing oneself.

Hypervigilance transforms the body into a calibrated medium of perception for asymmetrical power relations. Gazes, distances, threshold rigidities, micro-gestures are registered with increased precision, long before discursive consciousness catches up.

Withdrawal movement denotes the bodily marker of that limit up to which institutional orders tolerate embodied presence before they turn into exclusion. The slight recoil, the turning away of the shoulder, the involuntary shrinking of the silhouette: each of these movements is a measurement of the space's tolerance threshold.

Voice shifting reveals that even voice and tonality are recoded under the pressure of normative addressing. Changes in pitch, lowering of volume, language switching, hesitation, pauses, silence: in them, the tension between demanded legibility and strategic opacity becomes audible. Persisting in this tension creates noise in the system and denies its claim to smooth predictability. ‫ﻟﻢ ﯾﻜﻦ ﺧﻮﻓﺎ ﺑﻞ ﻗﯿﺎﺳﺎ دﻗﯿﻘﺎ‬.These seven markers must not be psychologized within the ECL. They do not illustrate the inner life of the subject; they make the operative violence of the institution bodily legible at the body's boundary—not measurable in a positivist sense, but legible in the sense of intersubjectively plausibilized markers. In them, the body does not document itself, but rather the violence of space, administration, algorithmic pacing, precisely where the dispositif simulates neutrality.

The Viennese Actionism offers a historical reference here, one that goes beyond the aesthetic. When Günter Brus, painted white and bisected by a black line, walked through Vienna’s city center in 1965 and was arrested by the police, he did not use his body as a symbol; he used it as testimony. The police reaction to the “breach of law” by the uncodifiable body provided empirical proof of the violent constitution of normality. Precisely this logic unfolds in the Grassi Museum: the reaction of the security staff is not the problem, it is the result. The Body as Glitch invites the system to visibly execute its hidden violence. The chase is the analysis. Amin Maalouf’s critique of killer identities sharpens this finding. Violence escalates where humans are reduced to a single affectively charged affiliation and forced into unequivocal self-declaration. Museum and algorithmic regimes enact precisely this narrowing: the body as legible code, as a stable marker of origin, as a cleanly classifiable appearance. The Body as Glitch is the conscious defense mechanism against this identitarian impoverishment, the refusal to transfer plural, multilingual, situationally shifted existence into a single grid. Opacity is the necessary protective technique.⁶¹

This moment is not an anecdote; it is a corporeal testimony: the space, which presents itself as neutral, revealed its true function through its control reflex. The disharmony between the normative, disembodied expectation and the sensory, unpredictable presence tore open the repression. The body became an epistemic node that did not criticize the logic of exclusion but exploded it.

There is a crucial difference between art that criticizes power and art that interrupts power. Critique operates within the framework; it names, analyzes, questions. Interruption intervenes in the framework itself: it sabotages the infrastructure through which meaning is produced and visibility distributed. ECL is not critique. ECL is interruption. This distinction is methodologically decisive. If embodied artistic practices are to act as epistemic interventions, they must not merely produce alternative narratives; they must attack the conditions under which narratives are recognized as legitimate at all. This is a different operation. It demands different tools. ECL synthesizes four operative tools:

Corporeal Testimony: Drawing on body-mapping procedures, embodied experience is understood as an independent form of testimony that makes legible affective and sedimented layers systematically excluded by dominant research formats. ECL radicalizes this approach: sweat, exhaustion, trembling, withdrawal movements are situated indicators of the dispositif violence that institutional knowledge orders usually derealize. .‫ اﻹرﺗﺠﺎف وﺛﯿﻘﺔ‬,‫ اﻹرھﺎق ﺷﮭﺎدة‬,‫اﻟﻌﺮق دﻟﯿﻞ‬

The Assembly: Knowledge here is not considered the property of an autonomous subject but the result of situated assembly and relational examination. The Assembly frees the body from its isolation and transfers it into a collective infrastructure of articulation – analogous to decolonial curricula such as Amawtay Wasi, but with the specific focus on the phygital Architecture of Appearance.

Strategic Illegibility: Through opacity and the Body as Glitch, the institutional compulsion to translate is sabotaged. The deliberate deception of the horizon of expectation places the observer in cognitive dissonance; the planned failure of stereotypical readability shakes the blind trust in the superiority of hegemonic categorization.

Embodied Listening: The body is understood as a medium of relational reception; knowledge is bound to resonance and responsiveness rather than controllability. The untranslatable is not overcome but endured. In the combination of these four tools, that which distinguishes ECL from other decolonial practices emerges: an infrastructure of sabotage that does not operate reactively

but structurally; not against individual manifestations of power, but against the Architecture of Appearance as a whole.

Md Mahedi Tanjir’s investigation of indigenous theatre and performance practices in Bangladesh as decolonial knowledge systems articulates an epistemic withdrawal from colonial codifications – a strategy that materializes in ECL to disrupt the Architecture of Appearance as a regulative matrix. Indigenous performance here is not cultural heritage; it is an operative knowledge technique. Daniel dos Santos Colin’s concept of dissident corporalities and the project Decolonizando Práticas Cênicas show how the body functions as a disruptive actor within hegemonic spaces – not through protest, but through the refusal of seamless legibility. This refusal is the unifying principle: Body as Glitch as a transnational practice that performs the same basic operation in different contexts. These convergences do not constitute loose kinship; they mark the transition from a singular artistic intervention to a collective, methodologically operating school. Within this constellation, ECL does not function as an application of the mentioned practices, but as their operative continuation in the specific context of phygital architectures of appearance: where bureaucratic files and algorithmic profiles work together to replace the body with its manageable double.⁶³

The specificity of ECL lies in the combination: phygital architecture as an analytical framework, carceral epistemology as a calibration instrument, At-Tamakkun as an operating principle, and the institutional landscape of East Germany as a laboratory. This combination is not transferable without adaptation. And precisely this makes it a method rather than a model.

Arabic and Sesotho remained untranslated – not by accident, but as a method. In this moment of non-translatability, something precise emerged: interpretive authority collapsed. The system, confident in its reading competence, faced an aporia. And in this aporia, what usually remains hidden became visible: the constructedness of superiority. ECL does not operate by producing new visibilities. It operates by the methodical cultivation of the glitch. While the Architecture of Appearance relies on faultless data streams and unambiguous identities, the Glitch Body disrupts the algorithmic logic of predictability – not through confrontation, but through structural incompatibility. This strategic illegibility operates in the sense of Édouard Glissant's Right to Opacity: the refusal of the violent demand for complete transparency. Opacity protects plural, multilingual identities from reduction by the colonial gaze – not through invisibility, but through controlled unavailability.⁶⁴ The voice in the Grassi functioned simultaneously as a shield and an arrow: as a shield, because it blocked immediate epistemic appropriation; as an arrow, because it pierced the museum's surface and forced the institution to expose its hidden violence.

Viennese Actionism achieved the same in a more radical form historically. Günter Brus reduced the body in his Material Actions to flesh, fluids, and uncontrolled affects – to a materiality that completely eluded bourgeois legibility. The system reacted with judicial repression, and this repression was the proof: illegibility is not powerlessness; it is a precise threat to systems that derive their power from seamless classification. In contemporary decolonial performance, illegibility shifts from abject materiality to linguistic and bodily sovereignty. The use of non-Western languages in The T(AA)CHE is not merely a refusal to communicate; it is a strategic aporia that radically reverses the Savage Slot: The West, which imagined itself certain of its interpretive authority,

proves incapable of understanding the languages of the returning subjects. Forced illiteracy affects the hegemonic subject, not the marginalized one.

A safe space that avoids conflict is not a safe space; it is a simulation of safety that reproduces the power asymmetries it was meant to protect against. Within ECL, the term 'Safer Space' means the opposite: a space that not only permits dissent but structurally generates and endures it, because dissent is the epistemic condition under which marginalized knowledge can be produced at all. The Assembly realizes this space through three operative mechanisms: Structured asymmetry: This mechanism balances the unequal distribution of vulnerability not through illusions of equality, but through explicit naming and targeted balancing. Those who risk more receive more protection – not through privileging, but through protocol. Rule-based co-presence: This secures the space against verbal extraction. Binding protocols for speaking with each other protect the opacity of the individual within the group and prevent what is said from being used as evidence outside the space. Circular knowledge circulation: This mechanism positions affected individuals as active knowledge producers. Their non-alignment with official narratives is not considered a problem of credibility, but an epistemic resource.

Within this framework, the Glitch Body unfolds its full epistemic function. What would be read as a defect or disturbance outside, appears here as a productive interruption of hegemonic grammar. The space functions as an infrastructure of non-integration: it enables presence without adaptation, participation without semantic pacification, and knowledge without institutional approval. Non-alignment is not recognized as a problem here; it is shaped as a condition of epistemic legitimacy. At-Tamakkun operates in this space in a specific way: not as an infiltration of the normative code outwardly, but as a collective practice of sovereign self-determination inwardly. The agonistic space is where At-Tamakkun is no longer an individual strategy, but a shared attitude – a Coexistence Without Closure, which does not reduce difference to reconciliation, but creates the infrastructural and somatic conditions

to remain capable of acting in difference. Illegibility interrupts the system. But interruption is not an end; it is a moment. What comes after the moment? How does interruption become an infrastructure?

Space is never neutral in the ECL. It is the material distribution of visibility, accessibility, and authority – the sedimented form of institutional decisions about who is permitted to appear as a viewing subject and who is made into an observed object. Spatial Practice intervenes precisely at this point: not as a decorative reorganization, but as an active intervention in the distribution of perceptual rights. The shift from moderation to hosting is not a terminological subtlety. Moderation manages speech, procedure, and meaning from an exterior position; it organizes participation without fundamentally abolishing the hierarchical difference between leadership and participation. Hosting, in contrast, describes a practice in which the conditions of encounter are not imposed upon the space, but embodied and carried by those present. The host position does not guarantee interpretive precedence; it keeps the relations, temperatures, transitions, and vulnerabilities of the situation open. Agency circulates through the shared physical presence of participants, rather than remaining with a mediating instance. In the project “ELEFANT,” in collaboration with Isabel Lewis at Kunstraum Mitte, Berlin, this logic was practically verified. Historical material was not museologically managed, but re-actualized through embodiment in open rehearsal formats. The space functioned not as a container for an already established history, but as an operative infrastructure in which affective resonance, movement, and co-presence reorganized the conditions of knowledge itself. Curatorial control disintegrated, the epistemic became a collaborative event. Spatial Positioning and The Architecture of the Room are the concrete exercises through which this reorganization is operationalized. Participants physically position themselves in the space relative to conflict statements; the spatial configuration makes disagreement visible and negotiable, without forcing consensus. The physical environment is collectively rearranged: the space is produced as a co-produced infrastructure in the execution of the encounter. To speak with Edward Said, this is a “struggle for geography” – and this struggle is not waged with arguments, but with bodies, breath, trembling, and exhaustion.⁶⁵

What follows is not a review. It is a choreographic reading, an analysis of what happened in the space, not what was intended. Location: White Cube. Present: Sobukwe Mapefane, Hammam Alawwam, Adam Harfouch. The audience: predominantly white, predominantly art-savvy, predominantly German. Minutes one to three: Silence. Three bodies in the space, standing, not posed. The audience waited for a beginning. The beginning had already occurred: the three bodies in the White Cube were the event. Not what they did, but that they were there.

The first somatic reaction in the audience: slight repositioning of their bodies. Some leaned forward. Others leaned back. This movement was not a reaction to something seen; it was the physical processing of a disruption of expectation. The dispositif had expected a format. It got presence. Minute four: singing in Arabic. Not loud, but with a corporeality that changed the space. What happened in the audience: those who understood Arabic – their bodies relaxed minimally. A recognition: I am being addressed. Those who did not understand Arabic – their bodies showed a characteristic reaction: the head tilted slightly, the gaze became unfocused. This is the physical form of the attempt to understand what eludes understanding. These two different bodily reactions in the same space at the same time: This is the Architecture of Appearance in its purest visible form. The same sound, two different systems of readability. The decisive moment: when the security personnel entered the room. What had been framed as performance until then was reframed as an institutional problem at this moment. The movement of the security personnel, the running cited in the abstract of this work, was not an overreaction. It was the most precise statement about what the institution truly sees when it encounters a body that remains uncodifiable: a threat to archivability. The performance did not end with the running. It ended with the running itself becoming part of the performance, without anyone having decided it. The institution had inscribed itself into the work. This is the choreographic protocol: The Body as Glitch invites the system to visibly perform its hidden operation – not to confirm a thesis, but for self-exposure. What was exposed was not the intention of individuals. It was the structural logic of a space that claims neutrality and exercises control.

The NSU complex (2000–2011) is not a historical example for this work. It is the paradigmatic case study of the Architecture of Appearance in its bureaucratic form. What state investigation produced was not ignorance. It was actively manufactured non-knowledge.⁶⁶ The relatives of the murder victims were systematically positioned as suspicious bodies: their statements were emotionalized (they were “too close”), their testimony delegitimized (they were “biased”), their knowledge reinterpreted (milieu criminality as an explanatory framework). The precision of this mechanism: it did not require the malicious intent of individual investigators. It only required an institutional logic that structurally classifies migrant knowledge as epistemically unformatable: as too emotional, too particular, too untranslatable for the requirements of state knowledge production. This is the Architecture of Appearance in the mode of bureaucracy: not the open prohibition of speech, but the production of a framing within which what is said cannot count as knowledge. Three structural operations can be identified here:

Emotionalization as delegitimization: those who feel too much supposedly know too little. The somatic knowledge of the relatives – their bodies knew what the file did not say – was read as bias instead of precision.

Isolation as disempowerment: Each case was treated in isolation. The serial structure of the murders, the same signature, the same logic, was systematically not seen, because seeing this seriality would have required a collective knowledge that the institution did not recognize.

Archiving as control: What went into the file determined what existed. What relatives said and did not enter the file institutionally did not exist.

From Historical Paradigm to Everyday Operation

The NSU complex demonstrates the Architecture of Appearance at an extreme: serial murders, decades of investigation, parliamentary committees of inquiry. This dimension might give the impression that it is an extraordinary constellation, an institutional failure of historical proportions that could be addressed by the institutions' own logic of enlightenment. This reading underestimates the thesis of this work. The operations that become visible in the NSU complex at the level of the state of emergency are not extraordinary. They are the everyday logic of the bureaucratic Architecture of Appearance, made visible by the dimension of its failure. The following case, anonymized and documented with the consent of the person concerned, shows the same three operations in a routine situation. No serial crime structure.

A young body. On the way home. The guaranteed safety of a routine route, from a meeting with a friend back to the parental home. The check occurred without any discernible reason for the body. No explanation, no justification. One question: “Where are you from?” This question operates within the architecture of bureaucracy on two levels simultaneously. On the manifest level, it asks about the journey of the last hour. On the latent level, it asks about the journey of the last generations. Which of the two levels is activated is not decided by the question. It is decided by the body that hears it, and which knows what answer is expected. The police were looking for another person. The only shared characteristic: the curly hair. This is the operation of the Architecture of Appearance in its minimal form. A single visible characteristic is enough to transfer the body from the category “child on the way home” to the category “suspect”. The specific person disappears behind the classification. What remains is a pattern of reading that has already read the body before it was spoken to. What followed was not an investigation in the procedural sense. It was a sequence of operations that gradually transferred the body from its self-possession into institutional availability. Physical violence, beatings. Spatial relocation, hours at the police station. Deprivation of parental guardians, the parents were not informed. Deprivation of physical integrity, the instruction to undress. Interrogation in the absence of any protective authority, no adults who should have assisted. This sequence is not an escalation. It is a translation. What is translated is the person into a manageable body. What stands at the end of the translation is not knowledge about the person. It is their complete availability for the institutional register.

The seven somatic markers of the Sensory Epistemological Instrument determined previously can be reconstructed in this case with a density that requires methodological caution – precisely because the density here is so high. Three points must be stated in advance:

The writing body was not itself in the situation. The reconstruction is based on the retrospective narrative of the person concerned, not on contemporaneous recording. What makes the reconstruction plausible is not its immediacy, but its consistency with patterns that have become readably shared in the Assembly with other bodies under structurally similar conditions.

The competing hypotheses must be named before evaluation. A twelve-year-old body confronted by uniformed police officers experiences general social anxiety that is not specifically reducible to racializing classification. A body with a family history of migration may carry sedimented experiences of previous encounters. A body that has learned to expect discrimination in certain situations can also partly elicit the expected reaction. These three explanations do not refute the structural reading, but require that they be taken into account as co-factors, not as disturbances to be eliminated.

What makes the structural reading plausible despite these reservations is the configuration of the markers in relation to the sequence of the act of classification – particularly the temporal coupling to the question of origin, the spatial sequence of dispossession measures, and the permanence of relational consequences. Not a single marker makes the reading plausible, but its pattern.

• Trembling: Named in the report of the person concerned as a vocal reaction at the moment of the question “Where are you from?” The trembling fulfills the condition of temporal differentiation: It does not begin at the sight of the uniforms, but with the classifying question. This temporal precision is not, in the strict sense, proof of institutional causality, but it is consistent with the hypothesis and not explainable by general anxiety alone, which would have set in when the officers appeared.

• Shift in breathing: Not directly named in the report. Methodologically honest here is only its marking as a reconstructive hypothesis, not as data: Forced Archiving of the situation structurally implies a shift in breathing, but the lack of direct recording precludes evaluation within the protocol. • Exhaustion: Named in the report as a state after the situation. Plausibilized by the duration of the encounter (several hours) and by the energetic costs of forced compliance. Stage 1 (contextual difference) is not clearly met, as exhaustion after several hours at a police station would also occur without specific institutional classification. What supports the structural reading is not the exhaustion itself, but its duration and its relational consequence. • Persistence: Present negatively in the report, as what the body could not do under conditions of complete institutional availability. This blockage is methodologically interesting: It shows that the markers of the Sensory Epistemological Instrument are not equally available in every situation. The absence of the marker here is not an indicator itself, but information about the scope of the protocol: Under conditions of extreme asymmetry, the action-related bodily level fails; only the reactive level remains recorded. • Withdrawal movement: Named in the report in its relational form, as a withdrawal from trust in formal equality. This form of withdrawal movement fulfills the condition of shared readability well: It is regularly recognized in the Assembly with other bodies that have had structurally similar encounters. Plausibilized by the permanence of the trace, not by the uniqueness of the situation. • Hypervigilance: Named in the report as a consequence, not as a marker during the situation. Methodologically, hypervigilance here is not to be read as a situational indicator, but as an indication of the calibration that this encounter left behind, as the genesis of carceral epistemology in a younger body. • Voice shift: Here lies the most analytically precise point. Named in the report as trembling of the voice, which in the somatic protocol of this work is read as a marker of tension between demanded readability and opacity, but in the police case file body as confirmation of suspicion. This double readability of the same bodily observation in two incompatible knowledge regimes is not a problem of interpretation, but the structural condition that makes a counter-archive necessary in the first place. It is also the point where the readability—

—protocol reaches its limit: What is plausible as a marker of one knowledge regime can be read by another knowledge regime as proof of the opposite. This asymmetry cannot be resolved by methodological rigor, but only by infrastructural intervention, by the Assembly as a place where the reading of the affected body is not overridden. Evaluation, more precisely formulated: Of seven markers, four can be reconciled with the readability protocol in their configuration with the case (trembling, voice shift with the mentioned limitation, exhaustion subsequently with reservation, withdrawal movement in relational form), one can be marked as a reconstructive hypothesis (shift in breathing), one can be read in the function of genesis rather than situation (hypervigilance), and one is actively blocked in its execution (persistence). This distribution carries the structural reading of the encounter not as proof, but as the most plausible hypothesis among competing explanations. This is the claim that ECL can formulate, and the claim that ECL should not exceed.

The three operations that the NSU Complex demonstrates in serial form can be verified in compressed form in this single afternoon:

Emotionalization as delegitimization: The double readability just described at the marker "shift in voice" is the emotionalization operation in its real-time execution. What could be read as a situated indicator is registered as an intensification of suspicion. The institution does not treat knowledge differently from emotion; it produces the classification "emotion" precisely where corporeal knowledge could challenge its own logic.

Individualization as invalidation: The case was treated as an isolated incident. A mix-up. A routine check. A subsequent clarification. The structural question of why a single characteristic is enough to cross the threshold from child to suspect cannot be posed within this framework, because it would have to make the institution's own reading pattern the object of inquiry. Individualization does not protect the institution from the individual case. It protects the institution from recognizing its own seriality.

Archiving as control: What went into the file was: a stop and search, a mix-up, a subsequent clarification. What did not go into the file

was: the blows, the duration, the undressing, the interrogation without legal guardians, the hours during which no one knew where the body was, and the seven somatic markers in which this entire operation was registered. What does not institutionally exist, because it was not documented in file form, is the actual operation. What circulates as a file is its manageable double.

In this shift between what the body registered and what was archived, Forced Archiving operates in its purest bureaucratic form. It is not the event that is archived. It is a substitute body that circulates faster than the event and enters the institutional memory space in its place. This is precisely where the somatic protocol of this work does not complement the file but competes with it – as an alternative archive of the same encounter that contains different data and therefore produces a different truth.

“Today he no longer trusts. Not the uniforms. Not the flashing lights. Not the promise that everyone is treated equally.” This sentence, formulated by the affected person, is not an emotional conclusion. It is an epistemic statement. What was inscribed in the body that afternoon is not a trauma that needs to be healed. It is a carceral epistemology in its genesis: The sensorium has been calibrated. It will in the future register power where other methods only see abstract structures, in uniforms, in flashing lights, in the promise of formal equality. This calibration is not reversible because it is not a pathology. It is the adaptation of a perceptual medium to the frequency at which it must operate since that afternoon. What the institution archived as a routine process has opened another archive in the body – an archive that appears in no file and precisely for this reason can become the primary source of a knowledge production that does not describe the Architecture of Appearance from the outside but registers it from within.

The NSU Complex and this afternoon share no magnitude. They share a grammar. In both, the Architecture of Appearance operates through the same three operations: emotionalization, individualization, and archiving. In both, the institution produces not knowledge about the event, but a double of the event that does not question its own functioning. This is precisely where The Assembly comes in. It is not a

format for processing individual cases, nor is it a format for coming to terms with historical failures. It is the infrastructure in which the shared grammar of these cases becomes visible across the differences in their magnitudes. What connects the afternoon in a Saxon city with the NSU Complex is not a mere comparison. It is a structural repeatability that only becomes visible when collectively documented. The shift from the NSU Complex to As-Suwaida 2025, in this logic, marks not a substantive continuity but an infrastructural mutation of the same epistemic violence: the replacement of the material body with a manageable double. • In the NSU case, the Architecture of Appearance operated through bureaucratic file violence; it slowly and institutionally produced the body of suspicion. • In the police check this afternoon, it operated through Forced Archiving in real-time execution; the body of suspicion was produced in minutes, through a reading pattern that was faster than the child standing in front of the officers. • In As-Suwaida, it operated through algorithmic pre-formatting: bots, coordinated accounts, and AI-generated videos produced a circulatable enemy image that preceded and enabled material violence. In all three cases, the body was replaced by its manageable double. In all three cases, the Assembly is the counter-operation: the return of the material body, its voice, its breath, and its testimony against the rule of the simulacrum. How this counter-operation materializes in practice – what happens when eight bodies come together under a shared frequency of institutional legibility and transfer their perceptions not into a state register but into a corporeal protocol – is the subject of the following chapter.

Powerlessness is often the result of statistical objectification. The RAA Statistics 2025 provided the quantitative skeleton of right-wing violence in Saxony precisely, coldly, anonymously. Affected individuals appeared as data points. Their knowledge, their bodies, and their experiences were reduced to numbers and entered into a register from which political demands structurally cannot follow. This is not a weakness of statistics; it is its function within the Architecture of Appearance. The Assembly intervenes in this grid through a clearly defined two-stage architecture:⁶⁷

Internal Strengthening in the Safer Space: The focus is on somatic regulation and the decoding of individual symptoms as structural insight. The RAA Statistics are not discarded; they are contextualized by the sensory epistemological instrument: Narratives are developed away from the state gaze, and data is validated by corporeal testimony, without risking re-traumatization. The glitch is understood here as an intentional act of sabotage – the point at which cooperation with institutional metrization is refused.

Public Intervention: Knowledge generated in the Safer Space is conveyed to the urban community through targeted dissemination formats. Transformation workshops convert "hot spot data" into political demands addressed to the Saxon state government. Migrant knowledge is permanently implemented as a sovereign counter-infrastructure in politics, academia, and society – not as a report of affliction, but as an epistemic intervention. This transformation is concretized in practice through the workshop series “Creative Tools” at the NSU Documentation Center Offener Prozess in Chemnitz. Under the premise that discrimination and violence are both individual and collective experiences, this format, which I conceived and led, offers a space where migrant knowledge is not discursively coerced but articulated through artistic media – art, music, video. The deliberate bilingualism (Arabic and German) of the series thereby operates as a decolonial tool: it breaks the hegemonic supremacy of German and enables the production of “living memories” that not only archive the past but shape a sovereign future.⁶⁸ At the level of macro-institutional intervention, the Assembly scales this knowledge into a societal dialogue body. A central example of this is the “C.munities” event series as part of Chemnitz 2025. In the format “Brückenbauen” (Bridge-Building), which I lead, the Assembly is expanded by an advisory board whose goal is to build a non-partisan network for participation and cohesion. Powerlessness is not only transformed here through artistic media but translated directly into the building of

sustainable democratic structures – thus, marginalized perspectives are transformed from objects of observation into active shapers of urban policy.⁶⁹

This practice corresponds to the indigenous narrative traditions examined by Md Mahedi Tanjir, which demonstrate how knowledge, through embodied repetition and collective testimony, acquires a sovereign infrastructure of validity that extends beyond the purely state document.⁷⁰ The Safer Space is not a harmonious retreat. It is a productive space of conflict where dissent is not eliminated but structurally negotiated. Security does not arise from the absence of tension but from its choreographed negotiation. This choreography allows the Glitch Body to convert the institutionalized coldness of statistics into political articulatory power: the nameless data point becomes a subject that sets the rules of appearance itself. Powerlessness shifts into a controlled redistribution of vulnerability, attention, and interpretive power.

Theory that cannot be operationalized remains descriptive. The Embodied Listening Toolkit is the answer to this problem: a methodological operating protocol that translates the theoretical diagnoses of this work into scalable, repeatable procedures, without neutralizing but rather condensing the epistemic substance. In a climate of institutional neutrality, which this work has unmasked as a masked perpetuation of the Architecture of Appearance, the Toolkit offers an operative alternative to consensus-driven dialogue models. It operationalizes agonistic pluralism (Mouffe), shared vulnerability (Butler), and situated knowledge (Haraway) as body-based protocols – not as abstract principles but as concrete instructions for specific situations.⁷² • Relational Endurance replaces consensual resolution with the capacity to remain present as a sensory instrument of knowledge under conditions of profound disagreement. Success is measured by an increase in ambiguity tolerance, not by the elimination of difference. • Embodied Testimony establishes physiological responses – breath, muscle tone, gaze behavior – as valid markers of a relational knowledge process: not pathologized, but archived as collectively readable indicators of the efficacy of epistemic tension. • Original Facilitation Protocols contain specific ECL instructions for setup and timing that stabilize bodies in a state of agonism to de-escalate violent impulses without depoliticizing the substantive conflict. • Non-consensus-based Evaluation measures somatic regulation and spatial engagement as metrics for relational capacity under pressure, thereby replacing success criteria based on the forceful assimilation of viewpoints. The institutional “Security Observer" is replaced by the figure of the Sovereign Listener: an attitude of radical resonance that does not fixate the other but holds them. The Toolkit is thus the condensed form of an operatively validated practice for a Coexistence Without Closure, a living together that does not force reconciliation but creates the infrastructural and somatic conditions to remain capable of action within difference. Practical Application: The analysis of a shift. What the Toolkit means under conditions of actual tension can be pinpointed at a specific moment.

In a workshop in 2025 with representatives of a civil society organization in Saxony, invited to discuss institutional discrimination, a participant remarked after about twenty minutes: "But there are also nice people in the authorities." This statement is analytically more precise than a mere denial. It does not directly dispute the structural diagnosis. It undermines it by shifting the level of analysis: from structure to individual, from the Architecture of Appearance to the moral quality of individual actors. The operation is not denial; it is individualization, and therein lies its effectiveness as a defense mechanism of institutional orders. What could have been done at that moment: correct, explain that the argument bypasses the structural level. What the toolkit required: none of that. The statement was not immediately resolved. The space remained in tension for a few seconds – not as agreement, but as a conscious practice of endurance. Only then did it become visible what the statement itself achieves: it shifts attention from the operative logic of the institution to the question of individual characters – a shift that institutional spaces usually immediately accept as reassurance. The tension was not eliminated but collectively borne. The success of this moment was not that agreement was reached within thirty seconds or that the statement was refuted. The success lay in the fact that the participants could remain in the tension without immediately translating it into moral clarity – neither confirming the "nice people" nor reflexively rejecting them. This represents a different concept of success, and a verifiable one.

There is a form of listening that awaits an answer. And there is a form that remains in non-understanding – not out of inability, but as method. Embodied Listening belongs to the second category: it does not operate as a precursor to agreement but as an infrastructure for the production of knowledge under conditions of unresolved difference. The body thereby performs a double methodological role:

As a sensory instrument of knowledge, it registers breathing rhythms, gaze behavior, pauses, and affective condensations as epistemically relevant data.

In exercises such as “Listening Under Tension,” the audience is compelled to register the illegibility of the Other as physical tension in their own body, rather than cognitively neutralizing it.

The protocol stipulates: remain present without preparing a response; perceive your own physical reaction – breathing, muscle tension, discomfort – as a data point, not as a disturbance to be overcome.

ECL is not the sum of its parts. It is the way these parts operate together: simultaneously, recursively, in execution. In this synthesis, the body does not appear sequentially as a calibrated medium of perception, then as an archive, then as a glitch, and finally as an opaque subject. It is all of these at once, and the tension between these functions is what distinguishes ECL from mere method. As a sensory instrument of knowledge, the body registers power frequencies and somatic tensions that remain invisible in conventional discourse formats – not as a preliminary step to analysis, but as analysis itself. As a corporeal counter-archive, it preserves embodied experiences and lived histories beyond state archival materials – not as

private memory, but as a collectively readable trace. As Body as Glitch, it interrupts algorithmic and institutional legibility – not as protest, but as structural incompatibility with the demands of the system. As Decolonial Opacity, it defends epistemic agency against the compulsion for total transparency – not as withdrawal, but as sovereign management of meaning. These four functions derive their methodological sharpness from an exilic sovereignty. ECL denotes a cognitive stance that rejects professional smoothing and institutional neutrality in favor of a radical, situated resonance. Sovereignty here does not manifest as control over fixed meanings, but as the capacity to reorganize the infrastructural parameters of appearance: time (duration of presence), space (arrangement of bodies), perception (Listening), and legibility (Opacity). The effectiveness of ECL is measured by Sovereign Metrics, not by institutionally legible evaluation frameworks. These metrics do not ask whether an institution has understood the intervening body. They ask whether the body has been able to assert its epistemic agency against the imposition of re-archiving. Relational Endurance does not measure successful communication; it measures sovereign resilience: whether difference, tension, and contradiction can be held in space without regressing into a compulsion for reconciliation. Somatic Regulation does not refer to therapeutic calming; it refers to the body's ability to remain operable as a medium of perception and as a glitch under pressure, without sacrificing its opacity. Success within ECL occurs where the body, as Body as Glitch, maintains its non-conformity, irritates the Architecture of Appearance, and resists renewed assimilation into a manageable register. Not consent, but resilience. Not transparency, but the stability of an embodied opacity. Not consensus, but the prevention of its neutralizing translation. ECL as a synthesis has been described. Now it must prove itself – not as a concept, but as a practice under the real conditions of real institutions.

The concepts with which this work began are not the same with which it ends. This is not a contradiction; it is proof that they functioned as tools rather than definitions. • Architecture of Appearance: In the beginning, this concept appeared as a descriptive category – a framework explaining how visibility is distributed. In the end, it is an operative concept: It not only describes what exists, but also makes visible what must be done to interrupt it. • Body as Glitch: In the beginning, this concept appeared as a metaphor for disruption. In the end, it is a choreographic protocol: The body does not disrupt; rather, the body invites the system to openly execute its normalization mechanisms. The difference is crucial: disruption is accidental; a choreographic protocol is intentional. • At-Tamakkun: In the beginning, this concept appeared as a strategy. In the end, it carries a danger that was not visible at the outset: the danger that the overfulfillment of the code translates into conviction in the code. A concept that has learned its own boundary is more precise than one that does not know it. • Decolonial Opacity: In the beginning, this concept appeared as refusal. In the end, it is an infrastructure: Not just the right not to be understood, but the active creation of conditions under which complete understanding is structurally impossible.

In the interplay of Assembly and Toolkit, the artistic work transforms from a stage of representation into a sovereign counter-infrastructure. This infrastructure does not criticize the Architecture of Appearance; it deconstructs it operatively by reorganizing the very conditions of appearance. The Assembly constitutes the political space in which migrant knowledge is protected from epistemic devaluation and translated into an addressable form – not through external protection, but through the collective practice of At-Tamakkun: the sovereign appropriation of the conditions under which knowledge counts. The Toolkit regulates the micrological conditions of this knowledge production by implementing Embodied Listening, agonistic presence, and Relational Endurance as reproducible, transferable methods. Together, both formats form an integrated epistemic machine that operates in three dimensions:

The production of corporeal testimony: It registers corporeal traces of epistemic violence through somatic markers such as breathing, muscle tone, and gaze patterns, not as symptoms, but as collectively readable markers.

The interruption of the dispositif: It establishes a competing choreography of visibility against the institutional order of the archive through targeted spatial reordering and strategic illegibility.

The redistribution of epistemic authority: It transforms objects of suspicion into instances of analysis, by considering the capacity for presence under conditions of profound disagreement not as a flaw, but as a measure of sovereignty. The success of ECL begins precisely where the institution fails it. Not institutional understanding, but the impossibility of complete appropriation marks the point at which ECL becomes sovereign as an epistemic machine. This work is submitted within an academic institution. This is not a neutral act. The university is not outside the Architecture of Appearance; it is one of its central production sites. It decides which forms of knowledge count as scientific, which languages are recognized as academic, and which bodies may appear as subjects of knowledge. Submitting ECL within this institution is itself an act of At-Tamakkun: the overfulfillment of academic codes – citation, structuring, conceptual apparatus – to the point where the institution must decide whether it recognizes as knowledge that which it cannot fully assimilate. The result of this decision is not part of this work. It is its next chapter:

There is a question that this work can only ask at the end, because it presupposes the complete working through of the framework to even be formulable. If the glitch is the moment in which the institution visibly realizes its hidden violence: Who documents this moment, if no body outside the institution has remained to document it? This question is not a rhetorical opening. It names the limit of ECL. ECL presupposes the existence of a body that, at least partially, can operate outside the coding logic of the dispositif. That there is a space – The Assembly, the somatic diary, the language that is not translated – in which the body encounters itself without institutional access. What happens if this space does not exist? What happens if the Architecture of Appearance is so complete that no outside remains? As-Suwaida, July 2025, has shown an answer – not a comforting one. If the outside falls away, Reverse Forced Archiving emerges as a final act: The body returns in a form that the system cannot smooth, cannot archive, cannot utilize. Not the image triumphs over the simulacrum, the unruly triumphs over the controllable. This is not a method. This is a limit. ECL ends where the body can no longer operate as an instrument of knowledge, but only as material of destruction. Naming this limit is not a failure; it is the most precise statement this work is capable of. The real question this work ends with, therefore, is not: How do we sabotage the Architecture of Appearance? The question is: How do we ensure that a body always remains outside, unarchived, unencoded, free enough to witness the moment of failure?

What happens after the glitch? This question is the actual challenge of ECL. The disruption of the Architecture of Appearance does not yet guarantee its transformation. Institutions can retrospectively neutralize the moment of disruption as a sign of their own openness, pedagogize it, and translate it into the format of the curated exceptional event, without altering the underlying axes of power. Epistemic sabotage retrospectively becomes an administrable moment of diversity. This danger of reabsorption is not marginal; it is structural. In this context, sustainability does not mean harmonious integration. It means the preservation of an irreducible friction – a permanence of sabotage that prevents the glitch from becoming a curated exception. The Assembly operates as a nomadic counter-infrastructure: in the specific context of the NSU complex, as a necessary counter-archive whose existence remains directly linked to the demand for comprehensive investigation. From this starting point, it emancipates itself as a wandering laboratory, actively seeking new spaces and institutions to intervene wherever hegemonic structures monopolize appearance.

The Toolkit provides the methodological basis for this transfer. Its validity results from an iterative six-stage development process that interweaves theoretical precision with the empirical reality of pilot workshops, thereby ensuring the transferability of ECL into diverse geopolitical fields of tension. ECL does not function as static teaching material but as operative sabotage against the algorithmic and institutional pre-formatting of categories of reality. Sovereignty, at the end of this investigation, appears not as a static possession but as the collective ability to constantly reorganize the conditions of appearance – whether in physical space or in the algorithmic feed. The goal remains a Coexistence Without Closure: a form of coexistence that does not force reconciliation but creates the infrastructural and somatic conditions to remain capable of action within difference. If we accept that the glitch is not a mere error but a necessary interruption of hegemonic logic, then we face the actual challenge: How do we redesign the common space when the protective architecture of consensus falls away and we instead encounter each other in the shared vulnerability of our bodies? Only if sabotage is maintained as a permanent site of friction can it shift the conditions of what is allowed to count as truth and legitimate appearance in the museum, in the state, and in digital space. ECL is not a finished method. It is a practice in development, and its development depends on contexts that do not yet exist. Three directions are foreseeable:

Extension to collective bodies: So far, ECL primarily operates with the individual body as an instrument. What happens when multiple bodies act simultaneously as a coordinated sensory instrument of cognition? The Assembly hints at this possibility; it has not yet been elaborated.

Confrontation with AI-generated bodies: As digital doubles become increasingly realistic, the question arises: How does Uncoded Presence operate

against a double indistinguishable from the original? This is not a science fiction question; As-Suwaida 2025 has already posed it.

Institutional transfer: ECL cannot be transferred as a ready-made model; that would turn At-Tamakkun into integration. What can be transferred is the principle of controlled infiltration and the tools for its application. The Toolkit is an attempt at this transfer, but it is only the beginning. What this work, in its focus on violence, resistance, and sabotage, does not explicitly name, is nevertheless present on every one of its pages: joy. The singing in Arabic in the Grassi was not just intervention; it was also beauty. The Assembly was not just a counter-archive; it was also community. At-Tamakkun was not just strategy; it was also the quiet pleasure of being more precise than expected. ECL does not arise solely from bitterness. It arises primarily from the conviction that the world could be different, and from the joy of the moments when, for an instant, it is.

Somatic Protocols and Archival Material (2011–2025)

Content: Field notes from institutional encounters in Leipzig, Dresden, and Chemnitz.

Format: Handwritten entries immediately after institutional contact, supplemented by body maps and voice recordings to document affective states.

Performance "The T(A)CHE" (25.01.2024)

Location: Grassi Museum für Völkerkunde, Leipzig.

Participants: Adam Harfouch, Sobukwe Mapefane, and Hammam Alawwam.

Documentation: Video recording and somatic protocol; analysis of interaction with museum staff as "Body as Glitch".

Assembly Formats: Chemnitz European Capital of Culture (2025)

Scope: 16 sessions with a total of approx. 200 participants.

Documentation: Anonymized session protocols for the investigation of collective listening processes.

Workshop with civil society organization (Saxony, 2025)

Topic: Institutional discrimination and accessibility.

Documentation: Somatic post-protocol and facilitation notes; anonymized at the participants' request.

Workshop Series “Creative Tools” (July – November 2025)

Location: Offener Prozess – ein NSU-Dokumentationszentrum, Chemnitz (RAA Sachsen e.V.).

Led by: Adam Harfouch.

Documentation: Bilingual (Arabic/German) artistic practice for the transformation of experiences of discrimination into collective memories.

Format “Building Bridges – Assembly Advisory Board and Societal Dialogue” (October 2025)

Context: Event series C.munities, Chemnitz 2025.

Led by: Adam Harfouch.

Documentation: Establishment of a societal dialogue body and implementation of a protected discourse culture for making marginalized perspectives visible.

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Herewith I declare that I have written the present thesis with the title:

Embodied Creative Liberation (ECL) independently and without unauthorised external assistance. I have not used sources or aids other than those indicated. All content adopted verbatim or in substance from other works has been identified as such. I affirm that this thesis has not been submitted to any other examining body in the same or a similar form. I am aware that a violation of this declaration can be considered an attempt to deceive and can lead to the assessment of the thesis as "failed".

Place, Date: Leipzig, May 15, 2026 Signature: Adam Issam Harfouch.