Artist and filmmaker Miko Revereza creates works that contend with themes of diaspora, colonialism, and Western hegemony from the perspective of the stateless. Strongly influenced by his experience of living as an undocumented immigrant in the United States throughout his childhood and adolescence, he visually renders the conditions of institutional exclusion and discrimination. For Revereza, experimental film operates as a means of defiance against the restrictions imposed upon migrants by the bureaucratic red tape of immigration policy and customs enforcement.
In the film Disintegration 93–96, Revereza focuses on his childhood memories as an undocumented immigrant. He turns the camera toward himself in footage that places him in different landscapes, echoing the format of old family homevideos. An intimate firstperson narration reveals his inwardlooking approach to the everyday struggles of migration and posits a more complex and conflicting exploration of discourses related to the American dream and official narratives of migration. Revereza also focuses on personal experiences in FOLDS, which documents everyday longdistance exchanges with family members. A superimposition of different types of footage encompassing travel, architecture, and visual abstraction allows for “distances to be folded to touch the other side like a folded map,” he says. “In making these folds, reaching across borders from which I am living in exile.” This silent film reifies the challenges faced by undocumented families with conciliating identities who must traverse physical and affective borders to keep their vital ties and solidarities afloat.
