Performance: Reading X, the Known Unknown

Departing from his Dutch residence permit ID card on which his country of origin, Palestine, is marked as "XXX (unknown)", Isshaq Albarbary's lecture-performance peels away the disembodied layers that come together in the making of an ID card. The performance reads the historical moment when the X entered Western consciousness and when four distinct, contemporaneous genocides paved the way for modern notions of subjectivity and statehood that continue to shape contemporary state bureaucracy's methods and truth claims.