“With an annual profit of between 3 and 10 billion US dollar, human traffickers are now the world’s largest travel agency, albeit illegal.” Dutch designer Femke Herregraven mentions this cynic fact in her introduction to the website Liquid Citizenship. The site is meant to raise awareness for the changed meaning of citizenship.
Liquid Citizenship is a site that gathers together international data on citizenship opportunities and exemptions, enabling you to explore the offers available for purchasing a national passport, or acquiring citizenship through other means, such as naturalisation, people smuggling or asylum seeking.
Herregraven, who graduated from Amsterdam’s Sandberg Institute in 2010, designed the project earlier this year for V&A Museum in London. Liquid Citizenship is also part of Design column #11 ‘Migration Matters’ in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, to be seen until 17 January 2016.
“In a landscape where the liquidity of citizenship is accelerated by commodification and deprivation,” Herregraven writes in the introduction, “Liquid Citizenship offers a glimpse of the increasing possibilities of how this legal status can be dropped and picked up at will – or by force. Different profiles and net worth enable access to various citizenship markets. Browse, compose and download your own citizenship portfolio. Let’s liquefy you.”