Bound

“Bound” is a participatory artwork in which 300 handmade passport facsimiles will be shipped to individuals around the world. The recipients will add images and stories to them to create a major collaborative artwork that explores the vast histories of identity, migration, ancestry, and legacies. These passport reproductions will be sent on a first-come, first-served basis; the resulting interventions will comprise an online archive. Passports are hot-stamped by Biruta Auna.

UPDATE: The sign up portal is now closed as all 300 spots have been filled.

For those of you who signed up, we’d love to see your work! Please use the hashtags #NotionsOfExile and #NotionsOfExilePassports and tag us @wpadc when sharing your work.

*NOTE: these “passports” are artworks and not legal state documents

Faride Mereb is a Venezuelan artist, award-winning book designer, teacher, researcher, and founder of publishing house Ediciones Letra Muerta. She currently lives in NYC with her husband, where she teaches and designs. Mereb is a visiting scholar at Columbia University exploring North and South Americas' hybridity through its printing and book history. 

“Notions of Exile” is a virtual exhibition and series of programs, co-curated by Fabiola R. Delgado and Faride Mereb. The project explores the cultural influence of the largest recorded refugee crisis in the Americas—the forced migration of six million Venezuelans from their homeland—using Venezuelan writer and journalist Aquiles Nazoa’s stories of exile and migration as a metaphorical "table" around which the co-curators have gathered artists from Venezuela and its diaspora. The participants include Génesis Alayón, Leonardo Almao, Miguel Braceli, Deborah Castillo, Alexander Chaparro, Gabriela García, Mercedes Golip, Samoel González, Franklin Hurtado, Diana López, Henry Rueda, Henry Solórzano, Ugo Ulive, Graciela Yáñez Vicentini, and Luis Moreno Villamediana. Access the virtual exhibition here.