“You have to fly a flag, otherwise you have nothing to wave”

design by Jonathan Trayner

Flying, for instance, the flag with the German colours and Walter Gropius' high modernist design on this specific cornfield works on many different levels. The piece 'Stop trying to seduce us with your visions of the past' is going to be performed and recorded before the backdrop of the satellite city Gropiusstadt, on the outskirts of Berlin, a town born by Walter Gropius' ideas about social housing projects during the 1960's after the construction of the Berlin wall.

Gropiusstadt has, especially during the 1980s repeatedly been associated with the alienation of youth and despair, and has become internationally known as the setting of the autobiographical movie Christiane F. directed by Uli Edel. (Subtitled "Image of a Generation" Christiane F. is the true story of a lonely, bored teenager in the '70's who gets into the drug scene at 12, hooked on heroin at 13 and becomes a prostiture at 14 to support her habit)

DV-Stills from the test shoot during summer 2009

The scene opens with the seven flags standing in a row. The seven actors enter the scene from behind the camera take up the flags and march with them in time to the music, following a choreography based on the Palace of the Soviets symbol. The march will finish with the actors returning the flags to their starting positions, they will then exit the scene back past the camera.

The corn field setting is itself also part of the former death strip dividing East and West and would during Berlin wall years have only be accessed by DDR (GDR) security guards.

Therefore, young adults carrying the flags while marching naked at dawn over this particular corn field to the neo-romanticist tune of Carl Orff expresses in itself a problematic gesture somehow signaling a defiance to the perceived failure of a possible progressive high modernism in favour of a reminiscent and accepted totalitarianism.

The flags are a shortcut ,
they are symbols representing certain aspects
of the Enlightenment project.

The flags flown all represent particular aspects of the enlightenment project, the progressive drive that led to the development of modernism as an overarching thematic structure, and which contains so many antagonistic strands. Some of these strands developed out of others, out of the merging of others or in response to them but all of them are distinct and the core ideologies that drive contemporary politics.

For more information on his ongoing project involving flags check Jon Trayner's page on http://www.trayner.org/taz/flags/