On 28th February 2009 Accidental Collective presented Schengen Smile, a piece commissioned by the University of Kent for WorldFest. This interactive and durational live-installation was a creative response to the ups and downs, swings and roundabouts of internationalism. The company created a surreal take on the everyday reality of international travel: waiting rooms, forms, desks, public alerts, stamps, and frozen smiles. In this context Schengen Smile operated as a public service with regulatory opening hours. Designed as a liner journey for one person at a time, Schengen Smile allowed people to adopt a new nationality, picked at random, for a period of twenty-four hours. The experience offered the participants an unusual mix of humour, biting critique, and visual poetry. Hoping to open up a space for reflection, Shengen Smile played with and subverted the structures present in the beurocratic world of visa applications, passport controls, and border crossings. Schengen Smile did not carry an overt message; Accidental Collective is not looking to make grand pronouncements. Rather this new piece was designed as a trigger, a provocation, which might have lead participants to reflect upon a specific theme.
The title refers to two international treaties signed by countries across the European Union in 1986 and 1990. They dealt with cross-border legal arrangements and the abolition of systematic and physical border controls among the participating European countries. Therefore a common Schengen Visa allows travel for tourism, business visits or temporary transit for employment purposes to non-EU citizens for a period of up to 90 days. Nevertheless, Ireland and the United Kingdom were the only EU members that did not sign up to the original Schengen Convention of 1990, and retained a right to opt out of the application of the rules after their conversion into European Union law. Thus, they have not ended border controls with other EU Member States, but do apply the provisions relating to police and judicial co-operation, which form part of the Schengen acquis.
