Too Many Papers, 2021-2022

It is part of the broader Letter to mom project, which explores the stories of individuals forced to flee their homes due to political persecution or war. 

Displacement is accompanied by an endless accumulation of papers – documents that define, contain, and determine a person’s fate: case files and verdicts left behind, permits that allow or deny passage, papers that grant or withhold the right to exist in a new place. In the performance, the artist repeatedly crumples clean office papers and discards them, one after another, her expression fixed and emotionless throughout. Behind her, a video of the same action plays on loop, doubling the image, amplifying the sense of an endless, unresolvable cycle. The recursion of gesture and image reflects the bureaucratic indifference inscribed in systems that reduce human lives to paperwork.