from: Kunsthaus NRW, Kornelimünster (DE)
to: Greylight Projects, Heerlen (NL)
This flag by Cristiana Cott Negoescu reimagines the iconography of sovereignty, fortune, and shared codes of value. At its center is a blindfolded Fortuna—Roman goddess of fate—framed within a shield. Traditionally tied to power, defence, and national identity, such heraldic forms are here repurposed, not as declarations of territory, but as vessels for a symbolic “code of honour.” Rather than asserting dominance, the composition evokes the protection of principle, dignity, and shared belief.
The background—a macro photograph of melting cotton candy—transforms into a swirling cosmic field, a galaxy of sugar dissolving into space. This delicate, ephemeral substance once used to lure, distract, or reward becomes a soft metaphor for the structures that shape collective desire: nations, economies, promises. The tension between the sweetness of illusion and the weight of heraldry encapsulates the fragility of belief systems, political, emotional, and mythic, that bind and divide us.
Responding to the framework of What the Flag?!, this flag resists the expressions of nationalism while appropriating its visual language. It holds space for a code unclaimed by state, gender, or class, an imagined ethical foundation that connects across borders through shared vulnerability and symbolic abstraction. The blindfolded Fortuna echoes not only justice, but the unpredictability of fate, reminding us that connection is neither guaranteed nor neutral. It is a wager, a negotiation, a risk.
Cristiana Cott Negoescu is a Romanian-born artist based in Düsseldorf whose interdisciplinary practice spans performance, installation, video, and photography.
by
Tags: