Empathy Flag at Tuileries (2021)
The six Empathy Flags are hybrids of national flags, layers of colours and shapes bleeding into one another making the defining characteristics of national flags, objects of affiliation and identification, become a celebration of the blurring of identity where shape, colour and movement are in a constant permutation. These coloured multilayered shades generate new infinite variations, hinting at our potential for interaction and the depth of our social experience.
The Empathy Flags playfully dodge definition, they create unstable ground as to our self identification. If many nation states were invented in the 19th century and their borders were often drawn in the abstract, invoking the security of people and countries to tie them to a fixed and eternal identity, perhaps we should now celebrate migration and the blurring of identity.
These flags of deep alliances, secret marriages, unfathomable complicities are paintings made to dance by the wind that suggest stories about identities, influences and journeys that constitute us, more so than the flags that may line the Champs-Elyses on the occasion of a parade or the visit of a head of state. The Place de la Concorde entrance of the Tuilerie gardens, in the middle of the Fer à Cheval, would therefore be the ideal context for the Empathy Flags.