Julien Serve

Born 1976 in Paris, he lives and works there. 

The man who made the flag of the country Earth

Julien Serve is a graduate of the Beaux-arts in Paris-Cergy. Originally working with painting and drawing, more recently Julien Serve has taken to exploring photography, song and video. The artist likes to superimpose images, to pile them up, turn them over, mangle them and force them to reveal their secret. There is often something compulsive about the way he works, layering images of childhood, combining and separating them, adding excerpts from magazines and snatches of interviews: revealing buried images. According to Marie Richard (H3 Concept, Paris): “Between freeze frames and layered images, Julien Serve often goes back over his images, reworking and pixellizing them, reinvesting them before he puts them before us. The result is spectral.”

For me Printemps de septembre, Julien Serve is presenting a standard constituted by overlaying the spectres of the flags of the 193 nations represented at the UN, plus that of Palestine. This inclusion of Palestine is not a militant action on the part of the artist. On the contrary, Serve believes that, at a time when Palestine’s possible membership of the UN is a matter of heated debate, it would have been partisan to exclude it from the process. 194 Flags is indeed an open-ended work: as and when other nations join the UN, their flags will be included in this “flag of the country Earth,” and the piece will be renamed as appropriate.
These 194 flags have been fused and compressed in a perfectly equitable way, all having equal visual intensity, so that no flag overshadows any other, no nation dominates another, so as to generate one single work – the equivalent of an egalitarian synthesis.

This work (and also this experiment) raises the question of national identity: let us imagine for a moment replacing all the French flags in Toulouse with this fusion flag: would we lose our national identity, or gain a globalised human identity? Floating over the Printemps de Septembre, Serve’s flag seems to answer this question with the words “Humanity is mine!” And humanity does indeed seem supreme when it is all together, united in a single emblem.
With its usually simple symbols and generally primary colours, a flag is what enables a community, a group or a nation to define itself, to assert a specific existence, to stand apart from others, and generally against others. The absence of nuance in the aesthetic of flags makes them by definition restrictive, exclusive, or even aggressive. The flag asserts itself; the flag imposes. In contrast, the fusion of all the different identities on one single banner shows us the image of a gentle, vibrant, harmonious, pastel and modest humanity. Adieu coats of arms, the affirmation of personal or national individuality, adieu antagonisms and even war: Serve’s flag is dreamlike, fantastic, and unlikely to rally any militant or military crowd to launch an assault on other ideas or nations: they are all there, spread over one another on the standard of utopia. Serve’s flag is thus profoundly anti-historical.