Helvécia (2024)
in distribution
Video
Full HD (16:9), Stereo
06:16 min
Loop
2024
The video work “Helvécia” (Portuguese for “Helvetia”) consists of a series of over a hundred individual images of a Swiss flag waving in the wind. The images each last for several seconds and show a snapshot of a national feeling that moves between a flag that is clearly recognizable as the Swiss cross and an insignificant red and white cloth. On the soundtrack, you can hear my mother (born in Brazil, a Swiss citizen since 1997) reading the lyrics of the Swiss national anthem and cautiously venturing into the letters and words of a new “homeland”. Through the accent and the uncertainty of the correct pronunciation, we hear a fragility and vulnerability that expresses what a foreign home might feel like. Embodied in the stills of a waving national flag, an attempt is made to dissolve the rigid borders and to recognize and make visible the shapeless, semi-recognizable, fluid forms of the flag as “Helvetia”. The title “Helvécia” is the coloration of a multicultural Switzerland,
that it is, can be or perhaps always has been.