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passport ('pæs,pc( )rt), n. an official government-issued documents

certifying the holder’s identity and citizenship and entitling them
to travel under its protection to and from foreign countries.

Passports are at the center of current events threatening to disjoint the world. Donald Trump’s controversial
travel and immigration bans are imprinted on their pages. Following the United Kingdom’s vote to leave
the European Union, its government has designed a post-Brexit passport. Because they do not have
one, millions of asylum seekers around the world cannot resettle. However, what might appear as an
unprecedented phenomenon has in fact a long-standing history. This exhibition conceives of passports
as the ruins of a modern dream now in terminal crisis –the dream of a globalized world.

Presented here is a wide array of archival materials depicting radically different ways in which passports
were used over the last two centuries, whether for tourism or to flee genocide and war. From Leon
Trotsky’s own account of his immigration status in Mexico to the records of the Polaroid Company, these
materials include not only passports, but also letters and personal notes regarding their issue or rejection,
fake passport photos, visa applications, and political pamphlets.

The contemporary art installation at the center of the exhibition was made entirely of used passports
bought by the co-curators on e-commerce sites. These passports also tell stories. They belonged to people
living in the twentieth century from diverse countries –some of them now extinct. Stamps within them
convey crucial events of a personal narrative against a background of national symbols and anonymous
signatures of custom officers. They are strongholds of national identities in a world we used to describe
as globalized. Having been deprived by time of their original function as legal documents, these passports
have entered the realm of trade, and now they are displayed as both pieces of art and memory.

‘Passports’ was co-curated by Rodrigo del Rio and Lucas
Mertehikian, both doctoral students in Harvard University’s
department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Fellow
RLL doctoral student Anthony Otey Hernandez guest
curated the case ‘Pura Vida’, and architectural designer
Haydee Casellas designed the art installation.
The exhibition would not have been possible without the
generous loans and collegiality of Radcliffe Institute’s
Schlesinger Library, Widener Library, Harvard University
Archive, and Harvard Business School’s Baker Library.
Heartfelt thanks also to Houghton Library’s formidable
Conservation team: Carie McGinnis, Laura Larkin and
Susi Barbarossa.