Most Favoured Nation

Taking its title from the economic principle used in international trade agreements to guarantee equal treatment between states, Most Favoured Nation examines both the fragility of the European project and the mechanisms through which Europe continually constructs and projects its image.

At the centre of the installation stands an iron structure resembling a signpost. Rising above a scattering of marble and stone debris, the work carries fragments of political speeches by heads of state and policy makers, each insisting on the vital role of culture in shaping society, unity, and collective futures. Removed from their original contexts and redirected in multiple directions, these statements become unstable ideological markers — rhetorical signposts pointing simultaneously towards aspiration, persuasion, and uncertainty. The surrounding debris evokes both the ruins of political modernity and the material remnants of Europe’s recurring cycles of construction and collapse.

A second element of the installation takes the form of an olfactory work developed in collaboration with the Botanical Garden of the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg. Cibic initiated the collection of rose varieties named after founding fathers of the European Union and other proponents of European integration — Konrad Adenauer, Sandro Pertini, and Victor Hugo amongst others. The scents of these roses were analysed and synthesised together with the historic “Europa” rose, first cultivated in 1928, resulting in a perfume imagined as the scent of the continent itself. Both seductive and unstable, the work transforms political history into atmosphere: a sensory portrait of Europe constructed through commemoration, branding, diplomacy, and desire.

The roses were gathered across Europe throughout 2021, during a period marked by border closures and restrictions on movement caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Against this backdrop, the project acquired an additional resonance. While the temporary collapse of mobility exposed the fragility of European unity, the circulation of the roses simultaneously revealed the continent’s deep entanglements — botanical, political, historical, and cultural. The perfume thus becomes both elegy and proposition: an attempt to distil the emotional and ideological residue of the European idea at a moment when its promises of solidarity, openness, and collective identity appeared increasingly unstable.

Across the installation, Cibic approaches Europe not as a fixed political entity, but as a performative construction maintained through rituals of representation, diplomatic language, and carefully staged symbols of belonging. Most Favoured Nation reveals how the aesthetics of unity — whether enacted through speeches, monuments, architecture, or even fragrance — remain inseparable from questions of power, exclusion, memory, and desire.