‘Humanising’ Statelessness Freeing Neha: An Art Experiment to Make Participants Feel ‘Legal Limbo’ Statelessness has been described as a ‘legal limbo’. 82 Nonetheless, it is often not entirely clear what that means. David Cottrell told me: People do not easily understand what is meant by ‘legal limbo’. So, they do not feel connected with the situation. We want to communicate with a wider audience through art approaches to establish that human connection between the stateless and the people who never knew what it feels like to be in a limbo situation. 83 Creative Court and Empathy and Risk came up with the idea of a ‘bubble’ as a metaphor to visualise and translate legal limbo to a wider audience. The image of a girl, who they named Neha, was placed with a mirror for her face inside a clear and transparent bubble with no exit (Figure 2). To look at Neha was to see one’s self in the reflection. Ralph Ya explained the concept to me: ‘it is because statelessness is constructed, anybody can be stateless in any time, and anybody can find themself in the place of Neha’. 84 I tried to imagine myself in the same place as Neha, and it shocked me to find I could not imagine the same situation for myself. Who could? Neha is trapped inside a bubble, she cannot go outside, go to school or play. To free her, Ralph Ya announced, we needed 46 Nepali passports. People who want to help Neha had to pretend that they were stateless; they had to fill out documents (birth certificate, citizenship certificate etc) and go through a series of stages to obtain a passport. I also participated in this experiment. I found out that 46 was a symbolic number, representing almost 4.6 million stateless children in the world. I asked Ralph Ya, why the passport? ‘Well, do you know a better way to free them from their situation of statelessness?’ 85 I did not reply, but I was thinking: if there is no other way to free Neha this limbo, then this art experiment would not give a solution that has not already been considered by academics and policymakers. Regardless, it was rather a different way to show the situation and convey the message. 82 83 84 85 See, eg, Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (n 27); Laura Van Waas and Melanie J Khanna (eds), Solving Statelessness (Wolf Legal 2017); Chikera and Whiteman (n 31). Informal conversation with David Cottrrell, Co-founder, Empathy and Risk (Mizanur Rahman, Empathy and Risk, 24 June 2019). Informal conversation with Ralph Ya, Artist, Empathy and Risk (Mizanur Rahman, 24 June 2019). Informal conversation with Ralph Ya, Artist, Empathy and Risk (Mizanur Rahman, 26 June 2019). 287