INTERNATIONAL NATIONAL ROMANCE, COMPRESSED

Fragment about a project where reality writes itself into the uncertain. Produced for Europati – the happy journey, KunstCenter Silkeborg Bad 2017.

We are in post-national and post-Christian Europe, where the countries’ sovereignty is diminishing and the basis of values is changing.

Belonging to a single nation is unfashionable. An everyday religious basis or language is outdated and perhaps unacceptable as self-definition. One must be able to go to war in distant countries for theoretical reasons, humanitarian, political or for pay. A national feeling based on the language and culture of the individual people, and as we have known it since Herder (1744 – 1803), becomes promiscuous. Europeans must identify with other and further groupings or principles: the EU, NATO, the UN, liberalism or human rights declarations.

I offer a value base with a picturesque definition, International national romanticism, compressed. It consists of European landscapes that try to come together in one image. Madeira meets Bayern or St. Andreasberg on Zealand. The locations are painted in and out of a grey area.