MIGUEL BRACELI

In Here Lies A Flag, Braceli and students from New Rochelle High School (in Westchester County, New York) dug a large hole in the ground in order to perform the action of burying a flag. This metaphorical process provides several different conceptual and pragmatic outcomes. First and foremost, it serves as an expressive means of acknowledging the cultural history of the land. Our contemporary nations have been established on lands with a rich history of past and present civilizations that have utilized and maintained the land prior to the arrival of colonial settlers. More often than not, the colonialists displaced Indigenous communities. The American flag, with its fifty stars and stripes representing each state in the nation, encapsulates this displacement. By planting the flag into longstanding Indigenous soil, this symbol of geocultural identity negates and erases the hundreds of Indigenous nations who established themselves on the land for generations before Europeans showed up. This reality and the ongoing struggle for equal, equitable and justice-based sovereignty and representation, is the crux of "Here Lies A Flag."

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