- Venue
- Galleria Moitre
- Starts
- Saturday, February 14, 2015
- Ends
- Sunday, February 22, 2015
- Address
- via Santa Giulia 37 bis, Torino, 10121.
- Location
- Italy
- Organiser
- Galleria Moitre, Torino
“The national flag covers every injustice, every inhumanity, every lie, every outrage, every crime. The collective responsibility of the nation kills the sense of justice of the individual and brings man to the point where he overlooks injustice done; where, indeed, it may appear to him a meritorious act if committed in the interests of the nation.”
— Rudolf Rocker
NOT A POSITION, BUT A PROPOSITION is a new solo exhibition by Lavinia Raccanello, an Italian artist and activist who lives in between Italy and Scotland. Her work focuses on the relationship between human beings, society and social justice, with a particular emphasis on the power of dialectic and participatory practice, and the conflict between state power and personal autonomy and responsibility. Her work has been exhibited in Italy, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, the United States, Chile and India.
For this exhibition the artist sewed more than two hundred black flags, each representing one of the sovereign states of the world.
The flags are of black fabric, some having black embroidery. Black on black: these flags represent the negation of all flags, one after another. One hundred and ninety-three represent the member States of the United Nations, with two for observer States, and one for an ex-member. Another nine reflect States which satisfy the declarative theory of statehood, whether they have achieved limited international recognition, or none.
The anarchist sociologist and activist Howard Ehrlich wrote: “Why is our flag black? Black is a shade of negation. The black flag is the negation of all flags. It is a negation of the nationhood which puts the human race against itself and denies the unity of all humankind. Black is a mood of anger and outrage at all the hideous crimes against humanity perpetrated in the name of allegiance to one state or another. It is anger and outrage at the insult to human intelligence implied in the pretenses, hypocrisies, and cheap chicaneries of governments.
“Black is also a color of mourning; the black flag which cancels out the nation also mourns its victims: the countless millions murdered in wars, external and internal, to the greater glory and stability of some bloody state. It mourns for those whose labor is robbed, taxed to pay for the slaughter and oppression of other human beings. It mourns not only the death of the body but the crippling of the spirit under authoritarian and hierarchic systems; it mourns the millions of brain cells blacked out with never a chance to light up the world. It is a colour of inconsolable grief.
“But black is also beautiful. It is a color of determination, of resolve, of strength, a colour by which all others are clarified and defined. Black is the mysterious surroundings of germination, of fertility, the breeding ground of new life which always evolves, renews, refreshes, and reproduces itself in darkness. The seed hidden in the earth, the strange journey of the sperm, the secret growth of the embryo in the womb — all these, the blackness surrounds and protects.
“So black is negation, is anger, is outrage, is mourning, is beauty, is hope, is the fostering and sheltering of new forms of human life and relationships on and with this
earth. The black flag means all these things. We are proud to carry it, sorry we have to, and look forward to the day when such a symbol will no longer be necessary.”1
1 Cfr. HOWARD EHRLICH, Why the Black Flag?, in Reinventing Anarchy, Again, AK Press, 2001, pp. 31- 32.
