Emptying Flags: an interview with Sonja Hornung

Neue Berliner Räume recently invited me to the presentation of their new summer exhibitionproject by Sonja Hornung, which follows on Robert Montgomery’s last year’s project Echoes ofVoices in the High Towers - both of which were curated by the Berlin-based curatorial initiative.

Sonja Hornung’s exhibition-project Emptying flags challenges the perception of space and the ideaof national states by intervening within the urban space. During the event, I had the chance to talkto the artist about the meaning of boundaries, the precariousness of borderless space and thegoals and difficulties of the project.

160g: You’ve raised flags before like, for example, at your exhibition at General Public in 2012,where you wanted to “empty out the powerful symbol of the national flag ” [source]. Is that stillwhat you are trying to do here or have you changed your objective?

Sonja Hornung: No, actually not really. The process may have changed a little bit and I got a littlemore skilled, because I learned to sew for this project.

160g: Manuel Wischnewski, one of the curators of this project, also said that you were just “doingyour job” and wouldn’t really self define as a performance artist.

SH: No, I’m not a performance artist at all and I don’t consider this to be performance. I tried to do

this as neutrally as possible because as far as I’m concerned it’s just about this moment when yousee a flag and you can associate it with anything. So your question about the General Publicperformance: I was trying to do exactly the same thing there. It’s just that now I’ve had a little moretime working on the project and I’ve perhaps refined the process of trying to make a flag and Irealised it’s quite difficult. Ultimately, the plan or the attempt is to try and offer these flags toembassies in Berlin. So, this idea of emptying out a national flag is definitely very central.

160g: If I understood correctly, you prepared patterns for the flags and then threw dice todetermine the final look of the flags. How exactly does that work?

SH: Exactly. The idea is to create an empty flag to make sure you don’t have any association or apredetermined idea of how it should look. It’s like looking at a map of Australia without thinkingabout the word Australia.

160g: That’s very difficult.

SH: It is difficult – it’s like trying to disassociate the bind between a word and an object or a borderand a space. And so, to loose that connection I thought I should use the indifference of randompatterns. So I did a lot of research on the history of national flags first and then picked out six orseven abstract patterns which are kind of the basic underlying structure, like the tricolour or thecross. Each of those has a number and I threw the dice – I used random.org – and then there is acouple of extra steps for working out the detail of the flag. So the flag you can see here on the farend is the finished flag and the three beforehand are steps in the process of making it.

160g: So you are in a way showing the process of creating the final flag to the public.

SH: In this case I wanted to because this is the first time I’m properly introducing the project.

160g: The way you raise the flags – very quietly – is also something quite in contrast with thetypical ceremonial of this action.

SH: I just try to do it as naturally as possible. They are flags for the every-person, so to speak, asopposed to a specific group of people.

160g: In 2011, you showed an exhibition of the Ground Project in which you took pieces of ground,which were specifically associated with a place and the name of a person and put them into thenon-space of the White Cube. Do you think your practice in Emptying flags has changed in

comparison to the Ground Project?

SH: That’s a very good point. What I was trying to do in the Ground Project – and maybe failed –was to have an archive of earth and visitors to have a list with the names and the places where theearth came from. So I asked friends and family to gather the dirt. I said to everyone, ‘I actuallydon’t care where you pick it up from’ and they took it really seriously. My dad went to the placewhere he was born and picked up dirt from the hospital and my friend brought some back fromTasmania and someone else brought some from the Outback. But really, it didn’t matter becausewhat I was trying to do was first to show there is a connection between people and space but thento disassociate that somehow. And I hope that the flags get a little closer to disrupting thatconnection.

160g: Upon hearing the title Emptying flags I could not help thinking about Jean Baudrillard and hisessay Kool Killer. Les graffiti de New York ou l’insurrection par les signes, in which he analyses thetremendous increase of graffiti in New York during the 70s and concludes by denobilitating formsof political protest which act in the current semiotic system and arguing that you can only be trulypolitical by using empty signifiers which deny the communication strategies of the current system.Referring to that, would you say your work is political?

SH: Maybe I have to put this into context: in previous projects where I worked in public space oreven in the Ground Project, I just worked with people with whom I come across in my everydaylife. So, for example I (in collaboration with Richard Pettifer) built a beach on a public intersectionand sat there for a week. We said we were waiting for the rising sea levels and people came andtalked to us and told us their concerns about global warming. And in the end, I realised maybethere are criticisms of this way of working. It’s really frustrating as an artist because you areconstantly maintaining a dialogue where you kind of know what people are going to say alreadyand they feel disempowered and there is nothing they can do about this situation.

So, my wish is to approach embassies with the flags. I would like to use them as a means ofapproaching people while they are working with a degree of power or a degree of responsibility.And even if I can’t have a direct conversation with them about the content of the work, I know thatthis conversation is happening somewhere within the embassy. When I talk to a diplomat in theSwedish embassy (there are five embassies of the Nordic countries, all located in one building inBerlin-Tiergarten; ed.) and she says she likes the project, she goes and approaches the otherembassies about it and then they can’t reach a consensus, I can be relatively sure they’ve hadsome sort of strange board room conversation where they discussed what it means to live in a

borderless space – what that means for our global reality today and how that contradicts thisbroader system that maintains borders, which embassies help to maintain. How can you come toterms with that, where can you even acknowledge it? And in the case of the Nordic embassies,they couldn’t reach a consensus.

160g: So they declined it.

SH: Yes, unfortunately. There were two contacts there who were giving the project a lot of theirtime – so in that sense I was lucky. So, I think if this project were just… abandoned flag poles inBerlin, then it would be what Baudrillard talks about – the empty sign, the attempt to be politicalwithout ever making any certain difference. But I really want to push it a bit further. And even if thispart of the project fails it started a conversation somewhere.

160g: As you are from Melbourne and live and work in Berlin, has this displacement or relocationaffected your idea of borders?

SH: I think I started thinking differently about borders when I travelled to the Basque country. It wasa few years ago and I walked through Northern Spain. Australia is weird because it’s just oneplace. There is a lot of diversity within Australia but there’s no border, it’s just an island. Well sure,of course there are borders, but they are perceived differently, or not at all. They are drawn acrossthe oceans and Australia is always moving them around on account of the various problems thestate has while mishandling refugees and so-called illegal immigrants. And Australians grow upthere and don’t really think about space as something that can change. And so the first time Itravelled to Europe, I started to realise that there can be a shift. That there are people who don’twant to belong to the space they live in, who want political autonomy. And these borders movearound. I studied the history of Europe but it’s different to go there and talk to people and toexperience that first hand, and of course this border trouble is not specific to Europe; it is a partand parcel of a slippery system that now carves up the surface of the entire planet. My partnerRichard and I, we travelled to Szekely Land in Transylvania which is a section in the middle ofRomania that is about ninety-percent Hungarian. We went there with the purpose of trying to findout what the tensions were, whether the people who wanted to be separate from Romania, theSzeklers, were super-radical or really conservative. I don’t know how much I should express myopinion on this one…

160g: Right, because if I understood correctly, you are trying not to impose anything on people asthe point seems to be to create an unmarked space.

SH: Yes, and it’s not an easy space either because borderless space exists today in many differentforms, like tax havens for example or refugees who live in a space without the protection ofborders. It’s not a utopian reality; it’s a difficult space to be in. But then I think it’s really important toacknowledge that. Or to acknowledge the fact that the stuff you use comes from somewhereyou’ve never been to – you know, your iPhone comes from Foxconn in Shenzhen and there arereal people who made those things. Just because you can’t see that space or because there aremultiple borders in-between you and that space that doesn’t mean there isn’t an immediateconnection between you and your money and that thing. I guess we live in a world where we canno longer pretend that the things outside our periphery can be neatly demarcated as beingseparate from our everyday reality. So I am trying to use the meaningless flags to think spacedifferently, to open up a new space, an open space that wavers, for me, between disappointmentand promise.

160g: Thank you very much!

Photography by Benjamin Busch. Copyright: Neue Berliner Räume, 2013

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Sonja Hornung is a visual artist from Melbourne living and working in Berlin, where she isundertaking her MA at the Kunsthochschule Weissensee.

Emptying flags will be taking place at different locations throughout Berlin until September 30, 2013and will be concluded by an extensive exhibition documenting the entire project in Spring 2014.

Article available online at: http://www.160grams.com/exclusives/emptying-fags-an-

interview-with-sonja-hornung