Drawing the Line in the Strait of Malacca. Photo:Chu Yia Chia. 2026 Penang, Malaysia.

                                                                              My loose thoughts about the Passport project.

In my work, I am interested in documents that claim to be neutral, but which in fact carry deeply embedded power structures. The passport is one such object. It presents itself as a representation of identity and freedom, while simultaneously functioning as a system of control, classification and exclusion. In the Passport series, I use the passport both as material and as symbol in order to explore the unequal conditions of mobility and the fragility of identity.

I work with cancelled original passports and travel documents whose legal function has already ceased. These documents still bear traces of movement, borders and administrative intervention, yet they have lost their validity as forms of identification. In the encounter between these physical originals and an image archive consisting partly of images from my private archive and partly of images I encounter on the internet, a new kind of image document emerges.

What interests me is not to explain the world through these documents, but to reveal how the world is already inscribed within them. The passport becomes almost like a form of skin, worn, stamped, perforated and surveilled. It is no longer simply a document, but a bodily object carrying traces of movement, control and lived experience.

The image making process is driven by methods in which chance plays a central role. The patterned passport pages, stamps and various visa documents function as active surfaces where impressions are displaced, layered and fragmented. Nothing is entirely mechanical; even when I occasionally use a photocopier, its unpredictability is activated, its “artistic soul” rather than its reproductive function. Because I work with actual passports that once possessed legal authority, rather than representations or fabricated documents, the material retains a charge that cannot be simulated. This gives even the element of chance within the process a political resonance rather than a merely decorative one.

 Joakim Stampe

Send me a message  stampe.action@icloud.com or give me a call +46 703572886