White Flag – capitulation / for the wounded
White flags have signified capitulation for thousands of years (by soldiers).
Most historians believe blank banners first caught on because they were easy to distinguish.
Civil War soldiers waved white flags of truce before collecting their wounded.
The various meanings of the flag were later codified in the Hague and Geneva Conventions of the 19th and 20th centuries. Those same treaties also forbid armies from using the white flag to fake a surrender and ambush enemy troops.
Flag of Truce – noun Military. a white flag displayed as an invitation to the enemy to confer, or carried as a sign of peaceful intention by one sent to deal with the enemy.
Ref – Artist folder blog – Sonya Clark – confederate flag of truce Peter Liversige – Hello Flags Edinburgh, curious to know why exactly they are printed onto white. John Gerrard – Virtual Smoke Flag billowing in the wind – WESTERN FLAG. Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg – created an installation, ultimately composed of 267,000 white flags at the DC Armory Parade Ground, to make visible the human toll of the continuing pandemic.
What does it mean to fly the whited out union jack? – A woman has agreed to let me fly it in her garden for 2 weeks, I will document the weathering.
Wendy Ross, 80 years old
I walk past Wendy’s house every day – usually she has a saltire up in the front garden but the winds blew it away. I yesterday asked her if I could fly the white union jack on her flagpole to which she was a bit confused at and conflicted over having a union jack in her garden. I went round today and she invited me inside for a conversation which she let me record – around nationalism, identity, life in Scotland and politics, see attached interview.
She is a retired housewife who worked briefly after her divorce at the Rosyth dockyard.
She would not touch the flag with her hands and said she asked her friend if he would help mount it for me, he refused because it is a union flag.
The weathering of the flag has changed the interrogation of capitulation to a visual of the the Scottish weather stripping away all signs of truce or reconciliation.
Having issues getting access to flagpoles as people don’t want a union flag up in their gardens – have posted in the local facebook group to explain my intentions.
Below video using the union jack in my last performance/experiment – I treated the flag as many here see it. it hangs in a tree with discarded plastic, a branch next to dog shit and in a bin. I’ve played the sash over this footage.
Overlapping interviews with Wendy over footage I took of both the performance flag – the white flag and others that I see around Rosyth. Treating the flag like dog shit on the hedge or a discarded bag in the tree,
