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This thesis investigates the permanent state of suspension experienced by the migrant body within the modern immigration machine. Caught between an unreachable origin and a promised arrival, the diasporic subject is forced to perform exhaustive “interpretive labor” to make themselves legible to both an indifferent bureaucratic state and the demands of a monocultural host society. Refusing to offer this lived reality as a passive spectacle, the project materializes the friction of the crossing through the lens of ergodic literature. The work takes the physical form of a 120-inch accordion book, measuring exactly one inch for each degree of longitude across the Pacific Ocean. As viewers physically traverse the 10-foot geographic void and its accompanying semantic sediment, the artifact redistributes the cognitive burden of translation from the migrant onto the audience. Hidden within the absolute center fold, bound by a single dark blue thread in a pamphlet stitch, lies an eight-page spatial poem. Abandoning declarative instruction for quiet contemplation, the work transforms the physical binding into a literal border. Ultimately, the project asserts the migrant’s “right to opacity,” reframing the illegible, in-between abyss as a sanctuary of un-flattened agency.

figma.com/proto/RG2j4CrEmnFgIboxcqXsD6

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