Fiktionsbehörde
‘Fiktionsbehörde’ is a fictitious immigration authority that reveals the structural violence embedded in Germany’s immigration bureaucracy. Rooted in the designer’s personal experience as a migrant navigating the so-called European welfare state, the project critically engages with ‘Ablehnungskultur’ — Germany’s culture of rejection — and reflects on the administrative limbo migrants experience while awaiting a visa decision. Their temporary residence document, Fiktionsbescheinigung, translates as ‘fictional certificate’.
Through an interactive performance involving audience participation and real-time digital feedback, ‘Fiktionsbehörde’ stages a satirical visa screening in the form of an auction. It reveals how the system forces migrants to compete for the possibility of rights, commodifying them and compelling them to navigate bureaucratic commercialism. The project deconstructs bureaucratic language and procedures to highlight the absurdity and cruelty of a system that masks exclusion behind legality and neutrality. The work examines how administrative systems delay, alienate, and actively reproduce inequality, transforming fiction into lived precarity.
‘Fiktionsbehörde’ will be exhibited during Dutch Design Week 2025.
Interactive Installation, developed at Social Design, Design Academy Eindhoven (June 2025) ©JUHWA LEE