Passport of Witness 👁️
This doesn't grant access across physical borders, but it allows passage to memory, experience, loss, and visions of hope
Amidst the devastating news and traumatizing images of Rafah last week, there was a glimmer of hope. An alternative portal to Palestine.
Passport of Witness
Back in February, I submitted a small piece of writing to an upcoming project:
‘In response to the devastating genocide of Palestinian people and the violent erasure of their homeland, a small collective of artists have organized this book arts project to amplify Palestinian voices and stories through the creation of a booklet that will resemble a passport, but rather than allow access across physical borders, it is a document meant to allow passage to memory, experience, loss, and visions of hope — a passport of witness. This booklet is dedicated to the memory of Refaat Alareer and the enduring future of Palestine’.
‘Passport of Witness’ features 25 Palestinians sharing stories, poems, and writing around themes of homeland.
Ren Allathkani designed the gold-embossed cover and interior tatreez artwork. It also features film photography by Baha Suleimon.
After open-edition submissions, editing, formatting, final revisions, and proofs, I’m excited to announce the project is now in its production stage.
Evan Bobrow of Rathaus Press is risograph-printing in his Rochester, NY studio.
After collating, cropping, and folding, the prints will be passed off to Sun Young Kang for hand-binding and sewing. She also contributed to the layout.
There will be a limited edition of 300 booklets. A handcrafted copy will become part of the Cynthia Sears Artists’ Book Collection.
The passport will be part of an exhibit scheduled for October 2024 at the Sherry Grover Gallery at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Arts that aims to explore themes of immigration, emigration, and forced migration, spanning across different eras – past, present, and future.
The remaining booklets of this first edition will be placed in institutional collections for historical record-keeping & distributed at community-led events.
A portion of the proceeds will be donated towards relief efforts in Gaza.
During fall/winter there will be a potential second printing, zine, or pdf version that I’ll be able to sell for donations so stay tuned.
It’s an honor to be one of many contributors to this handmade artist booklet. The process has been labor and time-intensive due to the meticulous craftsmanship of the team who have all been working voluntarily to support us.
Endless gratitude to the collective behind this initiative: Ren Allathkani, Sun Young Kang, Adams-Santos, and Tehlor Mejia.
Special thanks to Stephanie Adams-Santos, a fellow Guatemalan artist who I met through
’s grief support. They invited me to contribute and have been dedicated to this project despite recovering from surgery and caretaking for their ill mother.‘We are so moved by your contributions to this project, to your stories, poems, memories…This book is shaping into such a beautiful, urgent, aching, and living document. Our intention is that these books be created with tremendous love and care and quality to be worthy of the sacred material contained within. These are hard days for the heart, but your words, your witness, your memories, and dreams keep the light and the fight intact’.
Thank you to everyone who has poured their broken hearts, urgent prayers, and trembling hope into this collaboration. I look forward to sharing further updates.
In the meanwhile, I thought I’d share a few other Palestinian art projects that explore and play with the idea of passport documents:
State of Palestine by Khaled Jarrar
‘The artist decided to declare the existence of a non-existent state and created a stamp with which he marks the passports of travelers and pedestrians. The stamp depicts the Palestine sunbird and a jasmine flower. It tells the story of a state-to-be, instead of looping discussions about a one-state or a two-state solution’.
The Great Illusion by Mohammed Musallam
‘The artist used hundreds of real and used passports in his installation to pass on a message about him being prevented from free mobility, despite what a passport is supposed to provide, by connecting scattered passport pages, free from any travel stamps, on a barbed wire’.
Documents That I Needed To Travel Outside Palestine by Majdi Hadid
‘More than 30 Palestinian artists, photographers, and designers were invited to map their country as they see it. Given their closeness to the subject, this has resulted in unconventional, very human impressions of the landscape, architecture, cuisine, music, and poetry of thought and expression. In this subjective atlas, it is the Palestinians themselves who show the disarming reverse side of the black-and-white image generally resorted to by the media’.
I’ll leave you with some of the prompts from Passport of Witness’ open call:
What is your wish for the land and/or the people of Palestine? What future do you envision for Palestine? What would you hope to see or experience?
What is a memory, story, or dream that you love about your homeland? This could be your own experience or one passed down through family.
What is a longing, grief, or feeling of estrangement you have for your (or your ancestors’) homeland?