No Border, No Nation
Performative Installationabout
Projekt developed for the European Forum Alpbach 2020.
Generaltopic: Fundamentals
A flag with a green E is hoisted and we hear the explanation that it is a European flag,
but it is still unknown, almost secret;
This find in the EFA archive was starting point for the project "No Border, No Nation" developed by Andrea Salzmann.
Out of this idea showing the flag of a yet not existing community,
she went a step further not by hoising a secret flag but by dissolving and
eluding the logic of identification of national and suprantional states by blurring colours
into pastel shades. And by adding five flags for a future society based on integration and solidarity.
Attached to this you heaer a slightly changed first paragraph of the Human Rights Convention.
As the artists calls the Human Right Convention the new foundation of a future community.
All beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit
of brother- and sisterhood.
"What happens when flags - representing nations - start to dissolve?
When clear colours melt into pastel shades? Then the construct of the nation
state is exposed and offers space for solidary thinking, acting and doing. Communities
could be redesigned in a global cooperation - beyond exclusion and isolation. A booming
bass also demands the inclusion of human rights as a new foundation of a global community.
The urgency is high and resists any capitalist market logic."
(Andrea Salzmann)
Andrea Salzmann made new flags bearing the essential call of global equality and solidarity.
In her view, identity should not be a derivation of artificially created nation states,
but of the Declaration of Human Rights. To implement this vision the national flags and
our societies as we know them must transform. Therefore the strong red, blue, black,
yellow will liquify, dissolve and blend with other colours until the nation is a memory
on which we build a more united, just and peaceful communion. The European Forum Alpbach
is the community to fight for these ideals and will therefore wave Andrea Salzmann’s flags
as a symbol for the process of overcoming old lines that divide us and strive for more.
(Panorama - Magacine of European Forum Alpbach)
"The history of nation states is linked to political and economic developments that
suggested that the corresponding challenges should be met in autonomous and separate
territories. The current political, economic, climatic and cultural developments are of
an essentially transnational nature and call for measures and solutions that can only be
found beyond national boundaries. While national flags still stand for symbols of
supposedly territorial autonomies, the wind of challenges today blows across these borders
and demands new forms of solidarity and joint action.
The installation of knotted and jointly rooted flagpoles and flag colours,
which merge into one another, accompany the way into a transnational future."
(Andreas Spiegl, Art Historian and Professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Art)
"Fundamentals sind wie Signalflaggen, sie geben Orientierung. Manche sind schlaff
geworden oder verblasst, manche verschwunden. Das Europäische Forum Alpbach 2020 will
richtungsweisende Signale für das 21. Jahrhundert setzen."
(Franz Fischler, President European Forum Alpbach)
links
Sebastian Meyer
