Metallic Taste of Patience

Thinking through mapmaking as a practice of erasing, extracting, and producing historical ruptures, Millona & Liu use counter mapping to construct alternative cartographies that reveal state architecture's integral role in national identity building.

Their current research examines the immigration and naturalization process in the Netherlands and its long-term impact on those subjected to it. Framing the politics of citizenship as an uninhabitable architecture, Millona & Liu try to render visible its entanglements with the built environment, from immigration halls to the domestic interiors that become extended waiting rooms to contain bodies pending validation from the nation state. These bodies are consistently subjected to arbitrary and discriminatory policies determined by immigration laws. Drawing on auto-ethnographic research from the last eight years of living and working in the Netherlands, broken down into incremental timeframes, Millona & Liu reflect on their artistic practice as a form of trickery that has allowed them a way through this serpentine process and shaped their work indelibly.

Text by Amanda Sarroff (opens in new tab)