Out of over one hundred transcribed pages, Cummins selected forty-eight excerpts, which she then pieced together to create a narrative arc. This text collage is not chronological in the traditional sense. An Iraqi man’s description of children being orphaned in his country, for example, is followed by a Syrian boy’s description of losing half his friends (“Half my friends are dead.”), despite the fact that the latter took place years after the previous. It is the internal, lived experience, rather than any external reality, that unites these stories. And while the text bears testament to individual points of view, it also speaks eloquently to the larger, epidemic experience of displacement, resettlement, and separation.

To house her text, Cummins created a structure that is visually startling, experimental, and conceptually driven—in the words of one collector, “Like no other book I’ve ever seen before.” Text blocks are severed, then reprinted as quarto-sections on corresponding pages of four separate books. As in the case of the resettlers themselves, these stories must be reunited in order to be read, understood, and made whole again. Since the structure is also two-sided, with half the pages printed upside down, the reader is forced to puzzle out where and how to begin, and what order in which to read the pages. Halfway through, s/he is compelled to turn the book around in order to continue reading. Throughout this bewildering process, the reader/viewer is forced to experience some measure of the confusion, alienation, dislocation, and separation that resettlers experience every day.

The making of AlieNation / SepaRation spanned over a year and a half of work in five different locations: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York; Penland School of Arts in Penland, North Carolina; One Cottage Street in Easthampton, Massachusetts; and the artist’s own studio in Mt. Tremper, New York. During Phase One of the printing stage, deeply saturated flats of color were hand-squeegeed onto blank sheets of Arches Cover White. Blocks of text were then surprinted over these color fields, a challenging process that required masterful registration. The edition was bound by Lisa Hersey in the Coptic style, a structure that draws directly upon an early Middle Eastern binding tradition. Each set of four books is housed in a handsome plexiglass slipcase fabricated by SmallCorps, with laser-etched titling by Sarah Pike.