This artwork is the result of a photographic montage between two texts, reunited by their common date of parution (1798). The montage is based on an insertion of the American ’Alien and Sedition Acts’ into Malthus’ famous Essay on the Principle of Population.

Malthus’ text is famous for putting, for the first time, natural resources (food) and population growth (in this case the poor) in relation for the first time.

The two interlocking texts, which play on the repetition of the motif of the textual block made illegible by the scale of the print (a film contact), are directly related only by their date, but their montage puts in tension two tendencies that are directly addressed to our time: a certain fear of the other as “impure”, withdrawal and the designation of a scapegoat, at the same time as the resurgence of solutions to reduce the world’s population as a salvation for humanity.