Thomas Bellinck & Said Reza Adib - The Voice of Fingers

Thomas Bellinck (1983) is a Brussels-based artist whose documentary practice branches out into theatre, installation art, TV, ... He studied Germanic languages at KU Leuven and graduated as a theatre director from the Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound in Brussels. He is best known for his work on state-sanctioned violence, memory politics and mobility inequality. The Voice of the Fingers is the seventh stage in Simple as ABC, a constantly growing series in which Bellinck examines the apparatus of the EU im/mobility regime. Bellinck is a member of ROBIN, an organisation that supports socially engaged art, and a doctoral researcher at KASK in Ghent.

Said Reza Adib (1982) is a journalist, photographer and filmmaker based in Finland and Greece. Reza first trained with the Iranian news agency and attended several TV and radio documentary courses in Afghanistan. Between 2003 and 2009, he worked as a journalist for a number of Afghan and Iranian newspapers and magazines. In recent years, Reza has worked as a freelance photographer and independent documentary filmmaker in Greece and Finland, documenting the situation in various camps and shelters. As an author, narrator and dramatist, he collaborated on the performances The Wild Hunt (2019), The Voice of Fingers and The Museum of Human-Hunting (2019-2021).

ABOUT THE VOICE OF FINGERS

At the time of the Chinese Qin Dynasty, fingerprints were first used to identify burglars and to sign documents. 2,000 years later, Europeans would turn fingerprints into a technology for mass surveillance. For example, after the Indian War of Independence was precipitated in 1857, British colonial officials experimented with the use of fingerprints to quickly and simply solidify their administrative hold.

Then, in a 2015 working paper, the European Commission called for the detention of both people seeking asylum and those crossing EU borders without official permission, as well as those refusing to be fingerprinted. It spoke of coercion to obtain the fingerprints and referred to people being obliged to give up their fingerprints as 'data subjects', carriers of readable information.
Together with journalist Said Reza Adib, Thomas Bellinck writes a text based on their joint research on border regimes. Starting from the tiny, innate grooves on their own fingertips, they zoom out. To a world where line patterns on a fingertip unlock laptops. In which governments requisition that line pattern as a measuring tool to determine who can enter which territory. A world where your fingerprint determines whether the borders open for you or just stay closed.