Rights of Passage(s)

‘Rights of Passage(s)’ examines a pervasive yet invisible border regime that shapes contemporary cultural production, as reflected in the fragmented practices of autonomous publishing within the Sinophone diaspora. Operating under the ideological, capitalist and institutional forces that regulate movement, access and visibility, these strategies do not seek to overturn the porous border infrastructure, but rather to ‘critically inhabit’ it, leveraging its divisive and connective functions to sustain temporary spaces for alternative knowledge-making.

The installation uses assemblage and annotation to turn the sites of creation, logistics and dissemination into testimonies against the illusion of borderless cultural circulation. Everyday tools of autonomous publishing are reconfigured into sculptural objects. Soft nylon straps hold these objects in tension, while slow-moving images on e-paper devices embed annotations in plain sight, exploiting the technical limitations of e-ink to protect anonymity. These gestures of tension and visibility underscore ‘critical inhabitation’ as a dialectic mode of resistance.