Antrag auf Aufenthalt The waiting period is over. The system has decided to open up for a moment. About resistance, bureaucracy and exile A project as an act of protest against the tightening of migration policy, cultural cuts and bureaucratic suffocation, which particularly affects independent and migrant artists. A wake-up call to institutional structures that perpetuate exclusion and inequality under the guise of the system. In a sterile room, a newly arrived woman and a man who may be deported face a verdict that will decide their right to stay. With incurable conditions and fragmented pasts, they remain eternal applicants in a world that rejects them. Once artists, they now have to justify their right to exist and create through absurd forms, Kafkaesque interrogations and black humour. The production exposes a system that places people under general suspicion. Against the backdrop of a shift to the right, racism and cultural divisions, the play criticises systematic precariousness — especially among migrant artists — and shows how even committed cultural workers are restricted by rigid structures. 3D animations, holograms and AI create a poetic visual language that contrasts with the violence of the bureaucratic apparatus: endless corridors, doors leading nowhere, self-filling forms. In dialogue with Kafka (The Trial, Before the Law) and The Sound of the Breaking Man by Greymar Hernández, who defends the right of all artists to exist and create freely — even if mere existence requires a permit. A production by Dali Moustache Performing Arts × Gemischte Tüte Supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Dortmund Cultural Office.