Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 62

activities manifested, for instance, in the new Abu Dhabi’s Cultural District
on the Saadiyat Island and its mega satellite museums. At the heart of
Autopoiesis is the motivation to express the daily realities and complexities
of the UAE culture and society and provide the viewer with a window into
the personal and communal aspects of the region as experienced by its
own residents and visitors regardless of their citizenship status and socioeconomic
background. Autopoiesis is therefore an experiment that seeks to
reveal how different people from the UAE society think and feel about the
culture and identity of the region. If they were given the chance to express
and curate these themselves based on their experiences, narratives and
memories, what would the picture look like? How different would it be from
an “officially” curated version? As such, the project is less concerned with
representing or solidifying a monolithic singular (meta-)narrative about the
UAE culture and more interested in reclaiming the multiple fragments of
memory and identity in all of their contradictions, complexities, pluralities,
and diversities. To accomplish this, Autopoiesis harnesses the potential of
Web �.� technology. To understand why this is important in the context of
the UAE, it is crucial to understand first and foremost the ethnographic
aspect of the UAE and the make-up of its population.
Ethnographic landscape of the UAE
The first thing that might strike any visitor to the UAE is the diverse, immigrantrich
nature of its population, something that is not always reflected in the
“official” identity discourses. In fact, foreign nationals make up almost ��%
of the population with South-Asian groups being the majority (almost ��%).
In addressing the issue of citizenship in the UAE, the anthropologist Neha
Vora describes “a triptych of identities” underpinning the population of the
UAE: the “local” (native Emarati “citizens”), the “expatiate” (mainly Anglo-
European nationals) and the “migrant” (primarily South Asians) (����:��).
Each of these identification categories subsumes further transnational
identities adding to the complexity of the ethnographic landscape of the
UAE. Importantly, these categories are by no means neutral or equal. They
are highly value-laden and mobilized according to parameters of hierarchies,
power, and distinctions that are set by various entities including the state
and non-state institutions and groups. Questions of inclusion and exclusion
are therefore inextricably linked to this triptych of identities. They are, as
Vora (����:��) explains, defined according to a dichotomy of citizen and noncitizen
wherein the juridico-legal category of “Emarati” dictates the criteria
for belonging, mobility, and access to state resources.
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