Video animation, 3' min

Lifesize Draft (Utopia Battery)
Year of production: 2009,
Installation, 500x200 cm
wooden flagpole, knitting wool,
video in digital photo frame
(3’ min., without sound, loop)


Premiere: 2009 Ernst Museum
(Mûcsarnok Budapest)


„The installation titled Lifesize draft (Utopia battery) continues a series started a few years ago. The red flag reappears in a new representation, with its thread
wound into a giant “ball of accumulated history”. The installation is complete with a video compilation of US media images from World War2 (some of them dating back to WW1) representing knitting as a backstage activity to help soldiers fighting on the battlefields.
Among the photos mostly showing knitting housewives, members of women’s clubs, Red Cross activists and pupils the viewer will also recognize President Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor, an active supporter of the feminist movement.
The individual pictures linked by a morphing technique result in a continuous narrative interlaced with elements of propaganda, auto-therapy and activism.
The installation condenses the issue of individual and collective activity as well as the question of interaction between ideology and history-making into an evocative, revealing, yet hopeful formula.”
Judit Angel