All That Power Melts Into Noise

All That Power Melts Into Noise is an installation emerging from Cibic’s research into the ceremonial machinery of twentieth-century diplomacy and the ways culture has historically been deployed to choreograph political consensus, collective belonging, and the fantasy of international unity.

The installation interlaces two archival constellations discovered during artist’s research into the League of Nations at the United Nations Library & Archives Geneva. One consists of musical offerings — marches and anthems submitted to the Palais des Nations by amateur composers during the 1930s as gestures of faith in a peaceful supranational future. The other comprises unrealised proposals for a League of Nations flag, speculative emblems intended to visualise a collective identity beyond the nation state. No official flag was ever adopted; fears persisted that any singular image might inadvertently reproduce the very nationalist impulses the institution sought to dissolve.

Cibic fuses these parallel symbolic systems — rhythm and insignia, anthem and emblem — into a single spatial composition. The drum surfaces carry painted fragments of the abandoned flag proposals, transforming the instruments into unstable carriers of political projection. During the live activation of the work, two percussionists perform the donated compositions in a looping sequence of percussive calls, repetitions, and disintegrations. The installation oscillates between rehearsal and collapse, ceremony and interference, producing a sonic landscape in which aspirations toward harmony gradually unravel into resonance and noise.

Rather than reconstructing the utopian ambitions of early internationalism, the work lingers within its fractures. The donated songs and unrealised symbols appear not as monuments to political optimism, but as discarded stage props from a diplomatic theatre unable to escape the ideological structures it attempted to transcend. Through rhythm, repetition, and symbolic excess, All That Power Melts Into Noise reflects on the instability of political mythmaking and the fragile architectures through which collective identities are performed into being.