There is a certain desperation that comes with the lack of a last name. My work follows a perceived absence, mapping its genesis using fragmented and misconstrued evidence from old family photographs, ancestral lore, and self-inflicted omens. Naming becomes a fluid and expansive declaration of existence. Hinged upon approval from authority, whether governmental or familial, I argue that bureaucracy and superstition are two sides of the same coin. Now living and working as a recent immigrant, my temporary status informs my interest in the contradictions of legitimacy and legibility within America. Drawing from the aesthetics of bureaucracy, my work considers the erasure that occurs when one’s value is translated through a stack of papers. I engage with the materials and language found in government buildings, airports, classrooms, and other spaces, where the body undergoes categorization and evaluation. A permanent state of temporariness is reflected in my work that is usually ephemeral, modular, repurposed, and easily dismantled. Through actions and objects, I examine my on-going relationship with bureaucracy, blurring the lines between the domestic and the institutional, the intimate and the formal, the hand and the machine. My work comes from tracing and assembling out of lack, and as a way to fill in the gaps—the tension between hope and validity, between being the subject and being subjected. What if we looked at bureaucracy the way it looks at us?