Visa without a Planet: Collective Solidarity in a 1980s Exquisite Corpse

From 1983 to 1990, while living in exile in France, the Iraqi-born surrealist poet and artist Abdul Kader El Janabi circulated his defunct passport among a network of fellow radical creatives from around the globe similarly steeped in the aesthetics of Surrealism. Deploying the passport as the canvas for a cadavre exquis, more than seventy artists contributed drawings and messages and, in doing so, entangled themselves in a revolutionary act of defacement as well as a public display of support for one of their own. This paper will explore the role of collaboration, global networking, and solidarity in this project, which came to be called Visa sans planète (Visa without a Planet). By considering Visa sans planète within a legacy of Surrealist responses to exile and as part of a far-flung yet interconnected system of politically-minded artists, many of them migrants themselves, I argue that the project is predicated on the contributors’ mutual beliefs in the revolutionary call of their movement and that by compounding their individual political agency through a collaborative document, they could launch a potent collective response to the injustice of displacement.