‘Humanising’ Statelessness the ability to empathise is not only important for a feminist subject committed to knowing differently but may also be a condition of being understood as trustworthy by those within marginal communities used to being mis-represented. 94 From my experience and observation, I felt ‘Freeing Neha’ succeeded in creating empathy for the stateless by showing what it was like to be trapped in ‘legal limbo’. It was also critical to the state and questioned the legal process in different ways. However, the solution it offered was centred on the state and obtaining passports. So, on the one hand, it certainly humanised the condition of statelessness and provoked radical empathy, but on the other, it does not challenge the state-centred discourses related to statelessness. Rather, it showed that the solution to statelessness is still located within the nation-state framework and thus, does not offer any different path from the legal approach — an emphasis on obtaining passports as the fundamental means of Neha’s freedom from a ‘legal limbo’. Unseen and Untouchables: Searching for Hope with Hope Statelessness is often portrayed as a grim situation for stateless people. For example, Marion Couldrey and Maurice Herson entitled one of their works on statelessness as ‘No Legal Identity, Few Rights, Hidden from Society, Forgotten’. 95 This title draws a picture of stateless people and groups who are in total despair, drowning in an ocean of sorrow and uncertainty. Literature on statelessness has a tendency to talk about stateless people as if they are an embodiment of passiveness; they do not possess any hope, they do not have any agency, they cannot resist and as if they are only a category, a term or variable. They are only defined by their legal status; their nationality and citizenship. In an informal conversation, David Cotterell addressed this framing of stateless people: ‘There is a problem in the conceptualisation of stateless people. They are stateless, but still, they are human beings, they have hope, they have family, they get angry too, we need to recognise those’. 96 In my observation notes ‘hope’ and ‘agency’ featured on many occasions. Both Creative Court and Empathy and Risk think statelessness can be truly humanised through art that shows these fundamental sides of human beings. In line with the previous Part, the following paragraphs show how art and art interventions intend to represent hope and agency and, thus, humanise the condition of statelessness. I also critically observed the following artworks and practices to understand the type of knowledge they produce and how they are constructed. ‘There is not a single human being in this world who has no hope, everyone possesses some kind of hope’, says Manish Harijan, a Nepalese photographer and artist for Empathy and Risk. Manish installed some of his photography to represent the situation of stateless people and performed a live performance entitled ‘Unseen and Untouchable’. I had several opportunities to meet with Manish. He explained to me how his ideas on statelessness are closely related to his personal experiences. His initial photographs were inspired by his personal experience of being 94 95 96 Claire Hemmings (n 69) 151, citing Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Routledge 2000). See generally Marion Couldrey and Maurice Herson (eds) [2009] 32 Forced Migration Review. Informal conversation with David Cottrrell, Co-founder, Empathy and Risk (Mizanur Rahman, Empathy and Risk, 29 June 2019). 291