Every Flag Waves the Same

2018 – ongoing
UV print on acrylic
dimensions variable


Every Flag Waves the Same is an ongoing sculpture series made from sequential stills extracted from various videos of flags waving: At protests and parades, outside banks and government buildings, homes, gas stations etc.

The work shown above was produced from a video recorded at a prostest in 2019 in Rio de Janeiro, against potential budget cuts in public education. The flag is from the Movimento Correnteza, a leftist student movement founded in 2016 following the national unification of the former Rebel in UNE.

Stills from the video are printed onto flat acrylic sheets which I then heat-sculpt, striving to recreate the original three- dimensionality of the flag in motion. This process is complicated by inherent disadvantages; the basic limitations working by hand, the complexity of recreating such a highly ephemeral material in motion, and the impossibility of reproducing such a sliver of a moment when working with an image of such a moment, with its own perspectival losses.

Like the sculptural process itself, the representational intentions and signifiers of a flag and the aspirations of the entity it is representing (a political movement, a demand, a country, a people) become increasingly illusive and complex the deeper one delves; the supposedly singular message breaking down and splitting off as one strives towards its essence.