Passeport
A pseudo-facsimile edition of my international passport. Actual 'editions' of Belgian travel passports include printed backgrounds based on classic 'Franco-Belgian' comics (and a few Flemish ones), like Hergé's Tintin or E.P. Jacobs' Blake & Mortimer. Oddly enough, on each of these prints the characters were left out, remaining only as silhouettes and hence as ghosts of their former selves. In a wicked way, these 'funny' passports bear witness to one of Belgium's best known and most instrumentalized popcultural legacies (besides chocolates, fries and beers). This weird appropriation by the Belgian State, strangely making its citizens travel abroad with their colorful booklets, is in its turn reappropriated by a post-comics author and a comics publisher increasingly specializing in conceptual and other 'speculative' comics.
To spice up the whole a little bit, we warped the colors in a psychedelic fashion. The 'original' lay-out of the Belgian passports is less colorfull since it holds 48 special security features, including information that only reveals under UV light. Only authorities (or forgers) who dispose of the right 'techniques' can thus 'activate' this comics booklet to its full potential (like teenage parties using blacklight texts and drawings.) One of these left-out data are the characters themselves, appearing to the naked eye as empty but colored silhouettes. Obviously, many of the texts and drawings in this eerie passport bear the trace of its aesthetic adaptation for security and identificatory purposes. But the erased characters against their detailed backgrounds - that are on the contrary clearly marked by the 'hand' of their authors - have a spooky aspect, that is joyfully enhanced in our re-edition. This erasure of the comics' own characters at the very same place were they are being 'used' as a cultural identifier (for Belgian culture, it is) echoes the slow dissappearance of a clearly defined, national comics culture, also symptomatically exemplified in characterfree comics such as Riki Fermier by Ilan Manouach (2015), Citéruine by Jérôme Dubois (2020) or The Castafiore Emerald by Gabri Molist (2020). All of these comics have been preceded or influenced by the worldwide movement of abstract comics (2000s) and potential (or 'oubapian') comics (1990s), amongst other phenomena, leading to conceptual or speculative comics and alike. Oddly enough, in its aesthetic choices (out of security reasons), the Belgian states enforces this deconstructive relativation of the drawn character, and stresses exactly the opposite of what it pretends to uphold: comics heroes as central part of its cultural identity. One could also state that the Belgian government is (literally) hollowing out and wiping out the so-called comics culture it adores, since it explicitly chooses for worn-out classics (or 'oldies') out of this specific tradition, installing an instant and mainly male-made mini-canon for the world world to stamp and approve, while itself being on the brink of dissolving or at least 'confederalizing' one step further.
In any case, contemporary comics by younger makers are not part of this passport, and what is shown are only handmade traces of by now canonical authors whose name does not even appear: they function as empty and only partially neutralized 'fillers'... Naturally, our more democratically affordable artist's version - only 15 euro in stead of the 85 euros I paid for the issuing of my passport by the city of Ghent - does not dispose of the special hidden features of the official Belgian passport. But the editorial choices that sustain our artistic (re)appropriation accentuate the strange equation of often child-oriented illustrations with surveillance, of cultural patrimony and international security standards, of statehood, recognition, citizenship and questions of identity.
36 pp., 8,7 x 12,5 cm, 350 copies, digital print, La Cinquième Couche, 2023, Collection Essaim.
Presented the 26th of May 2023 @ L'Imaginaire, Brussels, with introduction by the publishers.
