‘Humanising’ Statelessness For Giddens, constraints enable people to exercise their agency. 121 The interview with Drik suggests that the stateless people of Western Sahrawi do not see themselves as stateless, and most of them do not have any intention of accepting Moroccan citizenship despite their suffering. The will to resist against the condition, to survive and to protect their identity, clearly shows the agency of the Western Sahrawi people — qualities that Drik himself thinks emulate cacti. Contending with Deirdre Brennan, 122 I came to realise that these theories on agency can play a significant role in understanding the concepts of definition and self-identification. By asking questions such as ‘what are the implications of portraying stateless people as the victims? Invisible? Legal ghosts? People of nowhere?’ ‘In what circumstances do people want to be defined as stateless people?’ Or, ‘in what space can stateless people be seen as having and practising agency?’ 123 Similarly, universally portraying stateless people as ‘victims’, ‘nowhere people’, ‘submissive’, ‘people with bare lives’ and waiting for ‘citizenship’ ignores their complicated and contextual history, identity and culture. Through the use of an artistic approach, Creative Court intended to go beyond these portrayals and wanted to represent the agency of the Western Sahrawi stateless people by portraying them as cacti; strong, resilient and able to survive in harsh environments. Despite their intention, the ‘agency’ perspective adopted by Creative Court suffers similar limitations to that of ‘hope’, where there is a clear absence of first hand stateless perspectives on artworks. Creative Court’s agency argument, and their act of showing stateless people as a resilient and aware group of survivors, is based in a single chance encounter with a stateless person. The photographs and artworks presenting such agency were not developed with stateless people, their concern and consent were not counted in the process. So, the question can be asked, who represented whom and how? Creative Court’s ideas and knowledge did not arise from empirical research with the Western Sahrawi population residing inside the Moroccan territory. Again, it was a different way of seeing and imagining, but it followed the same path of totalising the experience of the Western Sahrawi stateless population, based on the view of one particular member of the community. This is a nice idea to show the agency of stateless people and recognise their existence, but it lacks empirical grounds. With all the concerns regarding the humanisation of statelessness, when Creative Court sees stateless people through plant metaphors, in a way, they also dehumanise stateless people — their experiences become objectified when translated into plants or artworks. This is a paradox created by the organisation. CONCLUSION Throughout this article, I have analysed an art-based approach towards statelessness to show how it is different from the currently dominant frameworks. These dominant discourses on statelessness emphasise a lack of legal bond between the state and the individual. The personal experiences and perceptions of stateless people are mostly invisible in such discourses. Stateless persons are perceived as ‘legal ghosts’, as if they do not exist, and as vulnerable and passive 121 Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Polity Press 1984) 173. 122 Deirdre Brennan, ‘Statelessness and the Feminist Toolbox: Another Man Made Problem with a Feminist Solution?’ (2019) 24(2) Tilburg Law Review 170. 123 See ibid 172. 297