Lili Miklós

crystalizing a main interest:

• revolution
• hope
• better future

how revolutions effect each other:

• 1848 “springtime of the peoples”
• several waves of anticolonial protest
• revolutions against communist regimes
• Arab spring

following the form and size of the cockade, creating an army of different symbols of different revolutions, see what inspires

• news: opening of the “agent files”, communist-era informer docs

• kind of stuck
• brainstorming with Alex
• resources, ideas:
  •  You can always start with the original Hungarian revolutionary cockades, 1848,
  • – The Suffragatte rosettes and sashes, Britain, 1908-1910,
  • – The Asafo flags, Fante communities, Ghana (textile flags)
  • – The Neue Slowenische Kunst – NSK state in time (1992-present): Laibach, IRWIN, and the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre. I find this one a remarkable example. The passports they issued were not merely theatrical props. NSK participants have reported cases of people using them to facilitate travel across borders. An invented political object entered real historial circumstances and acquired significance beyond the artist’s original proposition.
  • – A Haitian Vodou drapo (ritual belonging): sacred textile flags decorated with thousands of sequins and beads. This is not primarly a national-political emblem. Its a different understanding of how textiles communicate belonging and how an object acquires significance through ceremonial use.
  • – An idea: a cockade made from human hair; as a historical mourning jewellery. a fictional commemorative cockade, using hair to stablish a physical connection between a collective event and the bodies of those involved.
  • – The remembrance poppy (already told you about this one): red paper poppies used to remember Britain during the First World War.
• ideas feedback from last time:
  • virtue-signaling: high vis cockade
  • remambrance: strands of hairs of my expat friends braided together, signifying new roots
• goals: doing more experiments, scaling up, something excessive, finding one aspect of the cockade to do it on

Starting place:

• The Hungarian symbol of the 1848 revolution against the Habsburgs, as well as the 1956 revolution against the ussr-subordinate Hungarian government
• A ribbon rosette worn above the heart traditionally on the 15^th of march

• it is a very small object comprising several topics I am interested in, such as
  • national and cultural identity
  • emotional attachment to history and community
  • nationalism, and the monopolization of national symbols by the right-wing
  • traditional crafts and their role in shaping this symbol
• the reason I chose it:
  • it is a fairly young
  • very recognizable in Hungary, but not so well-known in other countries

Investigating form and materiality

If we detach the form from fabric and its small size, the core geometry of a cockade (kokárda) is a concentric, rippled disc radiating outward from a central point. It appears across industry, architecture, and nature.

Shoe rosettes, award ribbon rosettes, ceiling roses (Stukk), turbine impellers, flap discs, oculi/rose windows.

next steps:

• further research
• material experiments – size, material, color and context