Bound Passport

100% of the funds for this sale go directly to migratory legal expenses for friends, family, and community members. (Limited copies from our own archive)

Includes a giclée, letterpressed. 

Bound started in 2021 as a project about parallels between identity, migration, and the passport as a book itself. After the first part of the project ended, we kept a small batch of passports to collect funds for initiatives regarding migration either in foundations or in our direct community of friends and family. The same problems we discussed back then are more current than ever in 2025, especially in the US, as now Venezuela is listed in the nations banned from migration and naturalization processes in the country. Thank you for supporting this project that is more than a result its a process in itself.

Bound was a postal mailing project and participatory artwork in which 300 handmade passport reproductions were shipped to individuals for interventions. They were made the exhibit Notions of Exile with the support of Washington Project for the Arts in 2021. The recipients added images and stories to them to create a major collaborative artwork that explores the vast histories of identity, migration, ancestry, and legacies. These passport reproductions were sent on a first-come, first-served basis, the artworks will be presented as an online archive of the interventions.

“Archives are an important part of my practice. For an exhibition in 2013, I digitized the portrait of my first passport, which I used to visit the U.S. in the 90’s when I was one year old. (That trip was to New York, where I currently live.) Since then, I have tried incorporating the document into other exhibitions but galleries have deemed the projects too political and have not wanted to get involved. For Notions of Exile, I have decided to circumvent the gallery system entirely and to use the mailing system instead for my project. My work is based almost exclusively on bookmaking, reproduction, and research, and I want these first 300 passports to be places for individual self-documentation, books for rebuilding memories and identity—not by the government, by the people themselves.”