Erika Harrsch suggests an American continent absent of geopolitical borders with her work United States of North America. She imagines a single unified realm encompassing the United States, Canada and Mexico, members of the North American Free Trade Agreement. To that end Harrsch has created an interactive installation whose centerpiece is an elaborately conceived passport. The passport features an original seal that combines symbols of the three countries and at its center, a monarch butterfly known for an epic annual migration between México and Canada, and a symbol of metamorphosis, freedom and hope. The interior pages contain texts on NAFTA, free trade, human rights and related topics, in place of visas and entry stamps. The passport itself is held in a vitrine, symbolizing its high value to an individual. Audience participation is essential to Harrsch’s installation. She invites viewers to spin a prize wheel for the chance to win a limited edition passport, a sardonic act connoting the lottery visas and the chance nature of illegal entry into the United States (one wheel segment contains the now-iconic silhouette of a running family, a symbol used on signage along the San Diego Freeway where immigrants have been struck by motorists) as well as the absurd logic of some immigration policies. - Elizabeth Ferrer, BRIC Contemporary Art Director -

Borderless United States of North America - ARTIST BOOK - WRITTEN CONTENT

United States of North America (2009) is a fictitious passport that joins the three NAFTA members passport's: Canada, USA, and México. It is an alternative vision that relates to my personal experience of being an immigrant. This piece was Influenced by my traveling between Mexico and the U.S. for the last eight years, working on a four year project filming the sanctuaries of the Monarch butterfly (known for its migrations between Canada and Central Mexico) and the intricate circumstances immigrants go through in order to get a U.S. Visa or resident permit. To create the cover image of the new passport, I joined the passport heraldics of the three countries. At the center the emblematic representation of the Monarch Butterfly, which belongs to the three nations, crossing freely without borders. All the symbols together form a distinctive badge of a nation, a new one unified and free. "United States of North America" expands the boundaries of these individual countries, questions the concept of nation, raises a conversation about immigration and reflects upon the outdated and incomplete NAFTA treaty. The monarch butterfly follows a mysterious progression that takes several generations to complete, they take advantage of each nation’s landscape for its life purposes; a linked reference with people's multi-national, multi-generational migrations that are increasing more in today's global world. A world in constant mobility where more people from many different countries are mixing and the idea of Nationality is diluting. We are no longer the Nation as it used to be, where citizens inhabiting the same territory were united by common descent, history, culture, or language.