Andreja Kulunčić selects widely accessible media for the production of her especially communicative art works: just as in the project Closed Reality - Embryo, where through the selection of samples from a "display" you could arbitrarily create a genotype of your child, in the on-line work Passport you can pick out the colour of the child's passport. Actuality and the segment of entertainment are emphasized in this work-in-progress (began in April 2001) interactive art work, which is a sort of combination of a questionnaire, statistical archive and a type of social game accessible on the web site http://embryo.inet.hr/passport. On the socio-economic map of the world you can click on the colour of the region from where you wish for the passport of your virtual child to originate, that is, of the child itself, as a projection of your own personal desires.

Miljenko Jergović calls the passport a fetish of the world created in the twentieth century, objecting to the segregation of people at border crossings on the basis of the colour of passports they hold in their hands. Contemporary societies incline towards pluralism and heterogeneity on the one hand, and on the other there is an increasing significance placed on the status of "the holder of indigenous rights" in contrast with "alien bodies". In the world of globalisation, where traveling to some distant country increasingly less implies going to a really different world, simultaneously, however, the gap between wealthy and impoverished countries and their citizens' living standards is getting deeper. Only 4% of humankind travels by air, while for many their movements are restricted due to economic or political-legal reasons (a witty example of this is the joke about Marx, Jesus and Buddha: if all three of them were alive today, only Marx would have a "desirable" passport and be able to "walk" all over the world without restraint).

After they were asked to identify themselves with reference to their age, occupation and country they come from, 110 of a total of 153 visitors to the Passport web site (up to January 27) stated their wish for translocation, either due to their discontent with the existing social milieu, or because of the syndrome of contemporary (postmodern) nomadic yearning and the need to go beyond the restrictiveness of their country or continent. Consequently, among the West Europeans who are involved in art and are in the "thirties" age range, three of them decided to stay "at home" content with the prevailing conditions, while two chose the passport of the most desirable emigration destination, the region of North America-Japan-Australia. The colour of that same region, as well as the equally attractive region of Western Europe, was selected as desirable for the passport of their future child by East Europeans coming from the same group, eight altogether, while only three were satisfied with the documents of their own area of provenance.

On the socio-economic map of the world, the Southern hemisphere normally gravitates towards the Northern, but one shouldn't forget that throughout the history of human civilization historical matrices are continually, almost imperceptibly, being changed and the power is being redistributed, so that sometimes "the one who was on top, is now below". "The world is everything that is coincidence," stated Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the colour of a passport acquired by chance, just as the colour of one's skin, cannot be exchanged, old for new, by web shopping. The socially coloured implication of this work and imposed question of intuitive principles of distributive justice is further elaborated by this author in the multidisciplinary project of the same name (http://www.distributive-justice.com) begun in August 2001.

Also by this artist:
THIS ISSUE:		ISSUE 02:
Passport (as postcard) Andreja Kulunčić		Distributive Justice Andreja Kulunčić