flying flags from Spain

Hello Mary Jane and thank you for allowing me to contribute to this blog. I must say I rarely participate in group projects but the idea of working around and for Peace captivated me immediately. I discovered the Flags for Peace project through Fiona's Paper Ponderings and felt that somehow my recent work and investigation of new materials were already asking for something like this.

My name is Ersi Marina and I live in Beceite, a small village in Northeastern Spain. The village is located in a beautiful, exuberantly green county called Matarranya and one of the things that made me decide to move here from Barcelona seven years ago was the very feeling of peace that seems to emerge from the land, the rocks and the vegetation. A place where one can work and create in serenity and in harmony with the surrounding nature.

This is a view of Beceite from my balcony.

I run a small non-profit Exhibition Hall called The Antigua Fabrica Noguera and I am a member of a local group of artists, still in search of a name as a group. I thought that it would be such a good thing if we all participated in the Flags project so I emailed them to tell them about it. Our next meeting is scheduled for Sunday 27 May and I hope that I will then be able to tell you more about our collective involvement in the project.

I also thought that we could hold an exhibition of photographs of the flags created all over the world in the Cultural Centre of Beceite. I contacted the local Town Hall and they immediately agreed. I will post photographs of the Cultural Centre in this blog, because it's a beautiful, luminous and warm space to use.

I admit there is a catch to this. If there are hundreds or thousands of flags, it will probably be impossible to accommodate them all. We'll see how we work our way around this obstacle. For the time being, this is my proposal: that each participating artist send us a photograph of their flag/s and we would mount them on panels for the exhibition. The photographs need to be rather small, an approximate size of A6.

I am really looking forward to this and I am following closely to see the creations coming in from all over the world.