The printer’s memos
The fictional commission gave each printer’s memo a particular addressee: a graphics firm explaining its design choices to the Lebanese government. Each memo adopts the rhetoric of the constituency behind that passport, translating the research into the language of an official document.
From prints to passports
The visa-page designs were made as individual prints. Metallic-luster paper brings a reflective surface to the line work, while the continuous historical strip carries the text through the exhibition space.
On screen, the pages are gathered into passports. Engraved covers, reflection and fluorescent overprints give each book a material presence; the page notes bring its imagery, text and sources into view.
Prints and materials
First exhibited in Baltimore, Maryland, in May 2023, the installation brings the passport prints and the historical strip into one space.
- Thirteen prints
- Twelve visa-page designs in three groups of four, plus one facsimile of the official Lebanese passport’s front cover. Colored metallic-luster pigment prints, each 4.921 × 3.475 inches.
The prints approximate Lebanese visa-page dimensions, with the metallic-luster surface enhancing line work through reflection. A proposed physical passport edition would use less-opaque archival pigment printing.
The historical strip
- One historical strip
- A colored laser print, 15 feet × 3.5 inches, running continuously along the skirting board as a news-ticker-style text band.
The wall sequence begins with ten inches of blank surface, followed by the official-cover facsimile. A fifty-inch interval leads to the introductory vinyl text; a second fifty-inch gap leads to the first passport group. Uniform fifty-inch spaces separate the three groups.