MANIFESTO
I thought the border would disappear the day I became a U.S. citizen.
Instead, it moved inside my body.
The border is no longer a line on a map. It exists in the pause before speaking, in the search for the correct word, in the instinct to soften an accent, to explain, to apologize, to prepare before being asked.
Sixteen years inside an immigration system taught my body something I never intended to learn: how to wait.
Waiting ceased to be temporary. It became a way of inhabiting time.
The body reorganized itself around uncertainty.
Bureaucracy does not only process documents. It reorganizes posture, attention, memory, language, sleep, and expectation. It teaches the body to anticipate judgment before it arrives.
The body learns to edit itself.
Not because it wants to disappear, but because repetition becomes adaptation.
Every form submitted, every renewal, every request for additional evidence leaves a residue that no official record can measure.
The archive does not contain that history.
The body does.
The border is not only seen.
It is heard.
It appears in hesitation, in pronunciation, in silence, in the sentence rehearsed before speaking aloud.
Language stops being only a means of communication and becomes a filter through which belonging is negotiated.
Every word becomes a small act of calculation.
Every silence becomes strategy.
Movement does not necessarily produce freedom.
Sometimes it only reveals the structures that determine who moves, who waits, who is believed, and who must continue proving that they belong.
Even approval is not an ending.
It does not erase what the body has already learned.
The process survives its paperwork.
My work is not about immigration alone.
It is about what prolonged bureaucratic systems do to a body over time.
Painting, ceramics, installation, and video become ways of making that invisible transformation visible.
I no longer ask where the border is.
I ask what remains after the body has carried it for so long that it no longer recognizes it as weight.
