In addition, tomorrow Tuesday, December 10, the COP25 round table will be held in the Auditorium of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum as a work camp that will be formed by Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, founder and president of TBA21, the curator and researcher José Luis de Vicente and the artists Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and John Gerrard.
“Western Flag is a carbon object for a world on fire, a monument for a century of consumption. According to COP25, it shows the potential risk that CO2 represents in an image, a way of representing it politically,” says John Gerrard.
The work Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), 2017 is a realistic simulation of a flag composed of an uninterrupted emission of rows of black smoke. Originally commissioned to commemorate Earth Day 2017, the work represents a mast located in a perfect real-time replica of a saline in Spindletop, Texas, the birthplace of the modern oil industry, in which the First oilfield in the early twentieth century. It is relatively unknown that the CO2 resulting from the emissions of oil burning in Spindletop still exists today, and it is only a small portion of the growing and vast concentration of CO2 that is present in the earth's atmosphere.
For Gerrard, this black flag made of smoke is a symbol of the western world, of voracious energy consumption and of the hyper-accelerated world economic order. It is a reminder of the slow environmental aggression directed at the biosphere, which predicts the dark legacy of Western supremacy and colonialism. A violence that is so indefinite, dark and growing that it is almost impossible to capture it in images. A violence whose effect will suffer for generations to come.
