CROSSING BORDERS: THE ART OF THE PASSPORT

In our contemporary globalised world in which a complex network of multinational corporations and nations maintains hegemony, a new type of ‘Empire’ as Hardt and Negri would say, it may perhaps seem an anachronism that the 19th century construct of the nation state retains near exclusive and universal control over the flow of humans across the planet’s surface. The passport – issued, owned and controlled by the nation state – remains the primary means of identification of citizens and – barring certain exceptions – the sole means of crossing borders internationally. Its small and insignificant physical form belies the sheer weight of abstract meaning held within. Each stamp, each unintelligible alphanumeric string of characters, each photograph is simply a streamlined frontispiece for a wealth of issues buried beneath, such as citizenship, migration, sovereignty, nationalism, nationhood, belonging, identity, exclusion and inclusion.