TROPSSAP was commissioned by Bainbridge Island Museum of Art for the group exhibition “Crossing the Line: The Passport Reimagined,” opening in October. Mita Mahato created it as a companion activity book of sorts for Arctic Play (though it can stand on its own, too).

Both it and Arctic Play attempt to see through and beyond extractive, touristic, punitive, capital-dependent modes of relationship with place. TROPSSAP especially wants to think beyond borders. The original version is made of inked newsprint woven into vellum. Mahato used greyscale, knowing that she would be riso-printing it

About the Artist:

Mita Mahato is a comix artist and poet who assembles her panels and pages with cut and collaged papers. Her work is currently featured in BIMA's exhibit Crossing the Line: The Passport Re-Imagined.

Building on the long tradition of cartoonists who direct the medium’s unique juxtaposition of word and image toward political and social reform, her work joins fragments of used and discarded materials—old newspapers, obsolete maps, junk mail, packaging scraps—in poetic experiments that dramatize entangled processes of death and renewal, specifically within the context of ecosystemic loss under capitalism.

Her poetry comix have appeared in places including Ecotone, Iterant, Shenandoah, Coast/NoCoast, ANMLY, and Drunken Boat, as well as in the collection In Between, published by Pleiades and listed in The Best American Comics of 2019. Her work has been supported by Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK), Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB), Loghaven, Storyknife, Black Earth Institute, Mineral School, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and The Arctic Circle. Her mother was Prem, born in Bihar. Her father was Basanta, born in Bengal. She currently lives in Seattle.