Language is one of the first forms of existence and erasure, but language is also a living being fed my many mouths.

Advocating for the inclusion of Unitedstater as an alternative to American, the artwork Unitedstaters began with an attempt to submit the proposed word to the Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries. Using the term “American” to refer exclusively to citizens of the United States risks excluding the rest of the Americas, namely the northern, central, and southern regions of the continent. The term “estadounidense”, widely used in Spanish, still lacks an official equivalent in English. Unitedstaters emerges as an alternative that seeks to emphasize the fact that America is not a country, but an entire continent.

Both Merriam-Webster and Oxford Dictionaries responded that, before adding a word, they require evidence of widespread use in print and online. Their advice was to contact major local newspapers to promote the term. Since then, the project has taken different forms across various contexts – The Netherlands, Mexico, and Colombia in 2015, 2017, and 2019:

• 2015: At Alicia Framis Studio, in front of the U.S. Consulate in Amsterdam, I presented the proposal in dictionary format, along with petitions to Dutch newspapers, in an effort to bring the term to life.

• 2017: Excélsior, a Mexican newspaper, published an article about the initiative.

• 2019: The term was added to Wikipedia, but it remained online for only four days. It was removed on the grounds that it challenged the idea of the “American Nation.”

A dataset later revealed the geographic origins of Wikipedia editors involved in the deletion.