Summary: Kadambari Baxi discusses the passport, a travel document whose design is often taken for granted, and presents excerpts from her recent project Citizenship By Design (in collaboration with Irene Cheng). The project investigates the design of international passports, identification technologies and travel regulations to raise critical questions about the contemporary nature of citizenship. These official objects, bureaucratic procedures and personal documents function at a paradoxical intersection of nation "branding", security technologies, individual identities, and dispersed communities. By highlighting the aesthetics of these objects and rules and by remixing their graphic elements into multinational hybrids, the project calls attention to the ways that citizenship is designed and the ways it might be reimagined in an era of proliferating global crossings. The Expert in the Galleries series is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Journeys: How travelling fruit, ideas and buildings rearrange our environment.. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, 17 February 2011
