introduction to the memorial

This is the virtual site for the EU memorial project, an intervention in the urban space. The memorial goes against the general understandings of a memorial as stable, eternal and erected by those in power, by being precisely the opposite: temporary, mobile and interactive.

It turns its audience to participants by inviting them to make an EU flag of their own liking, with the conservative set of tools: stars on a blue surface. Sticking florescent stars on a doormat, the passers-by would create their own design for the EU flag.

The process of reflection that any memorial seeks to invite emerges from the doing or seeing other people making the flags. The simple tools enable just anyone to make a design. They also relegate the EU into an everyday phenomenon. Street art and reflection becomes a possibility and practise for all.

The memorial only appears in a city for a few days, even a few hours a day. This plays with the way in which we actually acknowledge memorials for a moment only. For the passers by memorials become part of the everyday street furniture, streetscape which is denied reflection. It may nevertheless revoked as a place of meeting, tourist attraction or object of a political debate.

This memorial played on the identification on Europe and the EU. Crucially, it evoked different conceptions of and visions for Europe and the EU: the designs are all different in the same way as our perceptions of the EU are. The idea of Europe that the intervention left was the plurality of views and visions, as well as a possibility to relate to the larger phenomenon by personal action in the everyday space of the city.

The memorial first appeared on 14-17 June 2007 as part of the Bauhaus Kolleg (Dessau) interventions in the Romanian city of Sibiu, the European Capital of Culture 2007. The EU memorial here marked both the beginning of the membership of Romania in the European Union and Sibiu’s European Capital of Culture year.

Here the memorial became a tool for interaction between the locals and also the non-Romanian-speaking “cultural worker” who had made the intervention. It offered a chance for going beyond the borders of languages and cultures. A moment of reflection and communication.

Also the play over a doormat concreticised Romania’s entry to the EU. With the membership EU flags were flowing now next to all public institutions which previously had only the Romanian flag in the flagpoles. This object of identification and a political symbol brought from the above could be reconstructed, perhaps even reappropriated, through the personal designs.

Rather than asking for a revision of the EU flag, the memorial project calls for an appreciation of the multiplicity of visions for Europe, and for grassroots approaches for giving them voice and shape.