Mobilise! is a four-colour silkscreen print based on one of the gifted proposals for a flag of the League of Nations—an unrealised attempt to visualise a new form of supranational identity during Europe’s first major project of transnational governance following the First World War. The original design formed part of a wider collection of symbolic contributions submitted to the League and preserved within the archives of the United Nations Library & Archives Geneva.
For this edition, Cibic reworks the historical proposal through the addition of textual interventions drawn from political debates on art, culture, and representation within emerging nation states. Extracted from archival transcripts and overlaid onto the original composition, the phrases shift the flag from a speculative diplomatic emblem into a site of urgency.
The work forms part of Cibic’s broader research into the instrumentalisation of art, architecture, and design within political systems, particularly in moments when culture is mobilised to stage collective identity, consensus, and geopolitical aspiration. Here, the unrealised flag proposal becomes both historical artefact and unfinished proposition: a symbolic structure suspended between utopian internationalism and the political contradictions that ultimately undermined it.