14
clay and frame
by Asta Kalpokaite Golias
Appearance of Stamped Woman
Text and photos supplied by Asta Kalpokaite Golias
Please click the arrow in the centre of the frame to play the video.
Appearance of Stamped Woman is a result of Asta’s frustrating experience of waiting eight months for the bureaucratic process to approve of her student’s visa in Norway.
It made her ponder: In this world where everything is tagged, registered and given a unique number, if your passport and identity papers are taken away from you, do you still exist?
A child is born naked, flesh and soul. As the child grows and develops as a personality, so grows his/her “stamps” – birth certificate, passport, national insurance, employer’s number, taxpayer’s number, visas, marriage certificates, etc… finally, the death certificate.
A person gets more and more covered in stamps. It is a bureaucratic system which is designed to keep society “safe” but the person becomes a number in data, a statistic, not an individual.
Your visions, your efforts and your character do not define you, your passport number defines you.
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