A signal, a document, an act.

Niko Chodor’s new work in Ambulation evokes international maritime flag signals and REAL identification card landscapes inside Escolar’s shipping container, resting on-site the redwood coast of California. Using these two materials and terminals of American travel, the work explores how we might try to enter, feel, and depart from the abstractions that harm and restrict our movements together.

I WISH TO COMMUNICATE WITH YOU

At sea, signal flags correspond to letters of the alphabet and can be used to communicate a standardized code. A series of flags can spell out a message: “Lima, India, Kilo; Oscar” or, “stop immediately, I am altering my course, I wish to communicate with you; man overboard.” This distress call – first alerting, describing a change, and requesting connection – is echoed throughout the exhibition’s shipping container. Yet the underlying call for help might not be legible and lost in code.

In this body of work, Chodor removes the shapes, colors, and structure from the source material that bears close resemblance to nation-state flags. The flag elements here, however, blend into each other and lose their discreet form and meaning. Any intended messages here are disarticulated, open ended, and rendered un-useful. That these flags at times lose their function, reminds us of how nativist and xenophobic constructs become more apparent.¹

While on alert with these signals, what if we consider how nationalist ideological projections are attached to materials we use every day? ² How do we normalize a state-centric world in our daily acts, where the “contemporary world’s work has become policing, halting, forming policy regarding, and trying to administer the movement of people. Nationhood – the very definition of citizenship- is constantly being demarcated and re-demarcated.”³

HOW WILL I FIND MY DRIVERS LICENSE IF THERE ISN’T AN OLD PROSPECTOR ON IT. TREE. IS. NOT. PROSPECTOR. GhostalMedia•1y ago

IDEMIA, a French subsidiary company providing facial, fingerprint, and iris recognition for 600 government agencies, was recognized “for excellence in card design and security” when it produced the 2018 California REAL ID, featuring a gold miner, agricultural lands, and sailboats along the shape of the Golden State.⁴ Moving towards its mission to “Unlock the World, Make It Safer,” the French company advances the myth that liberty depends on expanding the hyper-surveillance of racialized “foreign peoples,” and that there are certain “homeland[s] to defend.”⁵

IDEMIA’s identification cards is one way that it helps nations track and label someone’s physical movements and presence as dangerous or safe, alien or native. While doing so, their cards feature the “unique beauty” of the state’s landscape, reinforcing symbols that are quintessential

to a place.⁶ Last year, the goldrush and agricultural motifs on California’s card were replaced with redwood trees, poppy flowers, and the Pacific coastline.

Chodor’s work in Ambulation reduces the REAL ID into its elements and symbols. The California landscapes therein are turned into patterns and sometimes become unidentifiable. By abstracting these elements even more, the work highlights what is absent and what might be hiding in its place. For example, the gold minor or prospector figure is no longer featured on the document. And so, while looking at the new document, how might we recall systemic discrimination and violence against non-white and immigrant prospectors during the California Goldrush period?⁷

These prints remind us that it is harder to recall this history because the new card design only features light peering through redwood trunks, as if a mirage. Historical memory is concealed or trapped. Or more optimistically, the hazy light evokes the sensation of waking up, giving up a spell of amnesia. The work ultimately makes us confront the discomfort of these materials. It calls forward our eroding privacy, or the fear that this document signals whether we belong or are permitted to move among redwoods and along eroding coastlines. We must ask then, what is the role of abstraction in these documents, beyond preventing counterfeits? What are IDEMIA and government agencies prescribing us to see and how to act? What are they asking us to forget?⁸