Veronica Ibargüengoitia

Website: veronicaibarguengoitia.com
Email: vero.bello@ymail.com
Instagram: @veronica_ibarguengoitia_art

Artist’s Statement

Identity cards issued by nation-states are among the primary documents used to establish citizenship and belonging. Yet when individuals cross borders, these documents can lose their validity, reducing identity to numbers and administrative data. A document intended to affirm personhood becomes a universal bureaucratic language of classification and accountability, detached from the human being it represents. The materials used in this work evoke funerary imagery and tombstones, transforming each ID into a memorial. What remains is the trace of an identity once recognized by one system but rendered illegible by another.

Artist’s Statement

Fragile Shipment traces a shipping box transported from Denton to Houston, El Paso, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, Dallas, and back to Denton, crossing immigration and customs systems along its circular route. While the box moves efficiently through logistical networks, its journey echoes routes navigated by displaced bodies subjected to borders, documentation, and surveillance. Constructed as a wooden art crate, the sculpture protects a fragile brown egg at its center. The familiar instruction Fragile—Handle with Care becomes an ethical demand rather than a shipping directive, asking us to recognize the vulnerable human being behind systems of movement, displacement, and control: everyone deserves care, always.