Everything we do today will look heroic in the future is a four-colour silkscreen print based on one of the unrealised proposals for a flag of the League of Nations, discovered by Jasmina Cibic during her research into the organisation’s archives at the United Nations Library & Archives Geneva. Intended to visualise a new form of supranational identity following the First World War, the proposed designs attempted to imagine a symbolic language capable of representing international solidarity beyond the framework of the nation state.
Yet the League never officially adopted a flag. Fearing that any emblem might privilege particular cultural, religious, or national associations over others, the institution ultimately abandoned the project altogether. The absence of a final symbol reveals the central paradox at the heart of early transnationalism: the attempt to create a universal image of collective belonging without reproducing the representational hierarchies and exclusions embedded within nationalism itself.
By reanimating these dormant proposals, Everything reflects on the fragile relationship between symbolism, diplomacy, and political imagination. Overlaid onto the image is a fragment of text drawn by Cibic from archival transcripts debating what the scenography of transnationalism should ultimately communicate and perform. The work exists suspended between proposal and failure, idealism and impossibility—a speculative emblem for a form of internationalism that remained perpetually unresolved.