Fingerprint Book

When designer and artist Andrea Anastasio visited the United States some years ago, he was fingerprinted (like everyone else) by the airport immigration authorities. This moment—both banal and ominous—stayed with him until it worked its way into his art. The result is Fingerprint, a visual fable that celebrates resistance to state surveillance and control. The artist's fingerprints, letter-pressed onto the pages of the book, create progressively complex patterns and sequences, transporting the fingerprint from the world of forensics and law into the freeing world of art and imagination.

Playful yet provoking, this is a timely and many-layered visual tale that is both a work of art and a political communiqué. Fingerprint meshes the line between art and politics, contextualizing barriers and checkpoints through a historical and theoretical consideration of the politics and ethics of identity management. An accompanying essay by historian and political activist V. Geetha points to those suggestive instances when people across cultures and nations have resisted fingerprinting, asserting their right to existence while fighting all attempts to foreclose their identities. This book is a fable for our times.

Each copy is an original letterpressed handmade edition.

Andrea Anastasio, a philosophy graduate, has designed for world-class groups like Memphis and Artemide. His work also appears in the permanent collections of museums around the globe. He was the 2005 artist-in-residence at Boston’s Gardner Museum. This is the first time his work appears in book form.