DACALOGUE is a study of immigration media and the concept of undocumentedness as it pertains to the artist’s experience with the DACA program from 2013 to 2018. States exercise sovereign authority over human migration through a regime of media comprised of visas, passports, work permits, IDs, Health Documents, as well as biometric data and information captured by private interests. If immigration can be understood as a medium, the bodies and labor of immigrants become the content, while the message is the exclusion from a national identity. Immigration media features an austere poetics and an aesthetic of control that is defined through anti-counterfeit design and embedded tracking systems. DACALOGUE fuses the “glitch art ethics” of deconstructing media with scanner photography techniques to paint the perspective of a life conditioned by immigration documents, revealing the contradictions between the actuality of the living immigrant and the personhood afforded by state authorities.
