Passport

Three fragments of a passport installed off a wall Macro shot of passport shred Macro shot of passport shred Macro shot of passport shred Macro shot of passport shred Macro shot of passport shred Macro shot of passport shred
Medium
Fragments of a cross-cut shredded passport
Date
2024

Shreds of a passport, mounted a centimetre from the wall, are put forth here as an art object. The shredder operates as a tool to manufacture strategic ignorance. Recognition is to be pieced together from the distinctive fragments of text and illustrations within this passport series.

The politics of the passport are built rigid and immalleable. It structures a realm; not spatially, but in terms of identity. Through sheer fixedness it will always fail to describe the broader world.

Then all dimensions codified on paper manage to index an implicit value declaration. Sensibilities carried into design of the technology are made indelible, and so innate political restriction emerges through both lack of imagination and the very practice of institution. The passport will privilege only a single designation at a time, by parameters deemed relevant at point of creation. The construction is revealed as incommensurable to any pluralistic model of identity. The gesture of the shred then affords the possibility to imagine an alternative construction.

Liam Macann is an emerging arts practitioner with a theoretical focus on the philosophy of technology. Recently graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) from UNSW, his research-intensive practice engages with a profusion of disciplines across an agile and experimental body of work.