Most of us want to live in a connected global world that allows us to freely explore faraway countries and cultures. At the same time the concept of nations and nationalisms are also strong in our society and they are often misused by political powers to foster not a feeling of belonging, but a strong attachment to a territory.
These themes and dichotomies have been explored by various artists, including Dutch Sanne Vaassen who, a while back, launched a project that consisted in reducing to loose threads the flag of various countries. The threads were then woven back together by an experienced weaver from the concerned country.
Each weaver (Jipke Lezwijn for the flag of The Netherlands; Miriam Hartwig for the flag of Germany; Naushad Ali for India; Sara Lindsay for Australia; Lisa Decavel for Belgium; Esther Révész for Hungary and Fanny Iguaran Inciarta for Colombia) radically transformed the flag, creating something completely new, inspired by their own techniques and skills. In this way the flags became not just an expression of a nation, but the visual representations of the skills of a craftsperson.
Last but not least, the final object invited to sit and ponder more about the value of nationalism, the borders of a country, the authority to determine if something is a country or not, and the issues that may arise with emerging or disintegrating countries.
This project is still in process and last year the artist focused on European Flags. during an Artist-in-Residency at Unit 1 Gallery in London, Vaassen divided the loose threads of the European flag among different weavers – Melanie Venes, Rakhee Shenoy, Ali Holloway, Sandra Gruescu, Erna Janine and Laura Woodhouse.
As for the previous phase of the project, each weaver used a specific technique to reconstruct the deconstructed flag, reshaping the stars, transforming them into lines or creating densely knotted strata and layers.
By unweaving the EU flag, Vaassen hints at the disgregation of Europe, but also hopes in a reunification, symbolically reimagined by the weavers.
These broken, remixed and rewoven flags are therefore the expression of several individuals' visual languages and codes, but also represent European citizens who, like threads, are fragile entities when they are alone, but they become stronger and capable of great things once they come together as one.
