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7th Solicitor

Performance documented by Julia Bauer

2024 · 22 min · Live Performance

7th Solicitor is a performance work drawn from my experiences navigating the UK home offices’s hostile system. Unfolding through a sequence of seven phone calls, the piece traces the exhausting cycles of waiting, uncertainty and administrative violence that shape the lives of many people seeking safety and belonging.

Set against the backdrop of an increasingly hostile political climate, the work examines how bureaucratic processes extend beyond paperwork, entering the body through anxiety, repetition and the constant negotiation of one's right to remain. Voices are passed between departments, promises dissolve into hold music, and lives become case numbers suspended in limbo.

For years, concerns for my safety forced me to censor both my queerness and my artistic practice. 7th Solicitor marks a turning point: a reclaiming of voice after silence. Through personal testimony, the performance reflects on exile, survival and the quiet persistence required to imagine a future beyond systems designed to diminish and erase.

Buzzcut Emerging Artist Award recipient 2022, supported by BUZZCUT, Take Me Somewhere & CCA.
Creative Scotland through the open fund.

Performers: HUSS, Caitlin Muir
Set Design: HUSS, Annie Graham
Sound: KAVARI
Styling: Oona Knox

Performances:

2024
Counterpoints x Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival
Glasgow, Scotland

2023
BUZZCUT Festival, CCA
Glasgow, Scotland

“The first solicitor hangs up in your face.

You’re told to still be hopeful.

The second solicitor interrogates you.

Mohammed Hussein Al-Chokhdar

The third solicitor denies you of your hope.

System failure.

The fourth solicitor does not view your struggles in urgency.

Come back in a month.

A day is all you have.

The fifth wants you out of his country.

Will you ever belong?

The sixth one has a fee you can never aﬀord.

Your existence is outwith your means.

The seventh solicitor entices you with opportunities that do not exist,

Smoke, Mirrors and Scammers.

Privileged men in positions of illegitimate power,

deny you of your humanity,

they do not care that you are gasping for air.

Hope is not for the faint of heart.”

HUSS الجوخدار

Until We Return (2025)

Their Hands Covered In Ink & Blood (2025)

7th Solicitor (2023)

Battle of Tranquility (2021)

I’ve Stopped Understanding Myself (2021)

And The Flowers Have Time For Me (2020)

Meet Now (2019)

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