ENTEREXIT: Animated Immigrant Stories presents a series of short digital animations about immigrants living in America. Mongolian American artist Eriko Tsogo is interviewing immigrant leaders from across the US to animate their inspirational immigrant stories into short experimental animations encased in personalized immersive three dimensional alter sculptures utilizing found objects, recycled items, and heritage-based arts.
The project is designed to create boundary blurring experience about the mixed migration stories of immigrants and refugees from our community who have decided to embrace America as home and the migrants who choose to leave. The animations show the contrasting realities of the American immigration system and the degradations perpetrated by its border regimes while also showing the tenacity of people who live borderless, imagining a life beyond their reality.
What does home mean to us? Why do we long to belong to someplace? How does belonging to a place, whether physical or imagined, create our sense of identity? what motivates immigrants to stay or leave? What does the American Dream mean? How are immigrants embraced and othered at the same time? How does one a home without a physical place or environment?
ENTEREXIT animations seek to help humanize conversations, perspectives, prejudice and hate about immigrants through visual storytelling, empathy and understanding. The project is a call to action and coexistence for an ideal world in which individuals can unite in celebration of our commonality and humanity, thereby invoking connectivity in the sameness that we all share beyond our differences.
“ENTEREXIT: Animated Immigrant Stories” project is part of BRIClab Video Art Residency due to premiere BRIC Arts Media in September 2025.