Requiem for a Flag
action and installation
exhibition project of master scholars of the University of Fine Arts Münster
'In Westfalian castles', Lemgo 1997
With its massive, stacked steps, and from a certain perspective, the castle tower reminded me of Buddhist sacred monastic architecture in Tibet. How would an oversized Tibetan-orange flag alienate this Renaissance building, even more so inscribed with characters that are indecipherable to most Central Europeans?
On an 18 meter long flag cloth I wrote letters from eleven written languages of the four largest writing circles of the world. A world flag: Egyptian hieroglyphics next to the Aramaic alphabet, characters from Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian... No row of letters made any sense, the individual letters were chosen for purely aesthetic reasons.
But hoisting the flag on the tower became visible reality only for a few minutes, then we had to take it down, the sailing effect became too strong. Raising the world flag remained a utopia. In one room of the castle tower, I set up an installation entitled 'Requiem for a Flag'. The flag hung from the ceiling, almost covering a wall, only a small part unrolled, the rope construction lay like a precious relic in a noble showcase made of armored glass, along with a description of the action in the manner of a logbook.
