“After yesterday’s lecture I started reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Ólafur Ólafsson points at a small pile of papers on the table. “I was thinking about reading a few articles to you. Although of course you already know it by heart, don’t you?” This witty remark allows the audience to laugh. But only few people chuckle softly. I wonder if the rest of them really do know it by heart..

Ólafsson continues; “So this is just to refresh our memories..”

“Article three, it was agreed upon in the year 1948 by the United Nations. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”

“Article six: Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.”

“Article nine: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.”

“Article twelve: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”

“I like this last one especially”, says Ólafur, glancing at the audience from behind his papers. “Because one day the police and some officials of the city came into my apartment to do a check on the people that were living there. I politely invited them into my living room and I saw that one of them just went straight into my sleeping room and into the shower room and started opening closets. I asked what she was doing. I said: you have no right to open my closets! And she told me it was police procedure. It was to protect her safety. I said: If you are so afraid of my apartment you should have stayed out of it.”

“Article fifteen: Everyone has the right to a nationality. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.”

Ólafur Ólafsson is one half of the artists duo ‘Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson’. The two have been working together on international exhibitions since 1997. Libia was born in Spain and Ólafur in Iceland but they feel more like ‘citizens of the world’, as Libia once said in an interview. Nowadays they live together in Rotterdam. Ólafur has come to the Van Abbemuseum to talk about some of their recent works. The artist expands most upon the project ‘Avant-garde Citizens’, which is a series of video-portraits of people that were sent to prison for not having a residency permit. They were not permitted asylum in the Netherlands, even though going back to their home countries could be very dangerous and could even cost some of them their lives.

Ólafur: “We started to focus on the existence of detention centres, deportation centres. And the fact that the first one in the Netherlands only opened in Rotterdam in 2003, quite recent. Now there are already about six or seven. First we wanted to get testimonies from people IN the prison, even though we knew that it would not be possible. But you know, you have to want to try. We had no idea of the detention centre, of the structure, how it worked. But we made contact with a visitors group that arranged visits to prisoners or detained. And through them we got into contact with people that had been in detention centres in the Netherlands and that had been released. And so we found people that were willing to tell the story of where they came from and their experiences in the detention centre. In relation to the tragedy of the people we decided to film them from the back, looking away from the camera, into the landscape. Because we could not film them in the prison we decided to do the opposite, filming them into the free space. Which was actually very difficult to find in the Netherlands. There are tourists passing behind you all the time. Or an angry farmer, asking you what you are doing. I remember telling a farmer I was making a surprise film for a school friend.”

“Let’s watch some parts of the video now. At the end of it I will show you the latest one which is a fragment of a Dutch person, an activist, who was arrested for blocking or barricading the deportation centre together with other people. And the police wanted to take her, as a ‘vreemdeling’ as a stranger, as an alien, in a detention centre based on the migration law. Due to the fact that she didn’t want to provide her name , her address, her passport. So they actually put her to prison as a foreigner. In her own country.”

The film starts. We see the back of a man, standing in a grass-land. He has been damaged by the world but seems not to be defeated, yet. “I stayed one year and seven months in prison. I hear a paedophile has to stay in prison for six months. Paedophile will be free soon. I don’t understand. I have no papers. I am worse than paedophile? I stay one year and seven months in prison. For what? For papers? Is it my fault I have to leave my country? It is my fault? I think not.”

Article three: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article six: Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article nine: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

For more information check the official website of Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson