Nansen's Pastport

(N.p.): Two Ponds Press, 2020. Skaar, Anneli. 16mo. Unpaginated. From an edition of 60 copies, this is one of twenty "pocket" copies, with a folded print of a copperplate map and artist's statement, housed in a cloth chemise.

Among his many achievements—Arctic exploration, advocacy for an independent Norway, significant contributions to the field of oceanography—Fridtjof Nansen's greatest remains his humanitarian efforts on behalf of refugees. At the end of the First World War, and at the request of the League of Nations to which he was a delegate, Nansen began organizing a response to the incredible population of displaced and dispossessed individuals. His efforts resulted in the first passport for stateless persons, a crucial intervention in recording the identity and nationality of those without documentary proof so that refugees could cross borders and apply for visas legally.

Here artist Anneli Skaar has taken up Nansen's mantle to contend with 21st-century migration. What was unthinkable to Nansen has only intensified as people flee homes destroyed by war and imperiled by climate change. As both response and critique, Skaar has created a "pastport"—a stylization that nods to the impossibility of returning to the past—by collaging details of United States banknotes into images implicating the neoliberal industrial enterprise in our current environmental crisis. The book asks the reader to reevaluate where they have gone and where they will go when the home they have known is untenable, and how they will identify when the veil of nationhood is torn away. Bound in salmon leather and boxed by Amy Borezo of Shelter Bookworks with details of orange life jacket fabric. Fine.