passport

This piece is part of a series of attempts to make sense of a place, of a culture, of a system. How can something so small as a passport be so defining of someone’s life experience? Is the commodification of nature still a symptom of a colonialist process?

Using the format of a passport, I collected stickers from fruits and vegetables that I consumed in my first months in the US; I had recently gone through the process of having to apply for a visa. The stamp I got in my passport is the reason I can be here now, eating and sleeping in a different land than the one where I was born and grew up. Eating the fruits grown in a land much more like my own. We both – me and the fruits – traveled and crossed borders.

I designed pages with mountains and palm trees, reflecting the landscape I now see every day. I bound these pages together. On the cover, one sentence from Frantz Fanon is split in two: “the settler’s town is a well-fed town / its belly is always full of good things.”