For years, I collected old documents and papers to use in my art. One day I found my own cancelled passports in a drawer and began experimenting with them. On a light table, a hidden world of watermarks slowly emerged from the paper, revealing details I had never noticed before. I fell in love with the result. Soon after, I began exchanging original artworks for cancelled passports from my friends and people I knew, and the project took on a life of its own.
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In practical terms, I carefully open the binding of the passports so they separate into multiple spreads. I then print images onto selected passport pages, working with the stamps, patterns and traces already present in the documents.
The worn passport covers bear national coats of arms and state emblems, carrying echoes of older histories and nationalist narratives. These official symbols, once intended to project permanence and authority, now appear as fragile traces of shifting borders, identities and ideas of belonging.
Passport archive is based on a personal image archive woven together with the global flow of images. Working with cancelled passports and travel documents, the project generates new visual narratives in which bureaucracy and personal histories intersect.
As images are pressed against the passport’s standardised structure, its claims to order and objectivity begin to shift. Stamps, visas and security patterns continue to encode movement, control and permission, yet through the cracks something else emerges: the human. Behind every passport lies a lived life. Through these documents, Passport archive explores the tension between individual experience and the systems that seek to define, regulate and control mobility.
If you have old passports stored away in a drawer, I would be happy to exchange them for an original artwork from the series. Please send an email for further information.
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