| IMAGE OF EUROPE EXHIBITION, BELGIUM, BRUSSELS, 2004 |
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The creation of the European Union will ultimately be recorded as one of history's quietest revolutions. Europe's reticence has clearly had its benefits: the European Union has already – without fanfair or retribution – become the largest economy on earth, its population nearing 500 million – almost twice that of the world's last remaining 'super power.' But increasingly, as the EU grows in size and importance, the ineffectiveness of its communication is proving to be a serious political liability that weakens its external manifestations and has unnecessarily eroded its internal support. To mark the occasion of the Netherland's 2004 Presidency of the European Union, AMO was asked by the European Commission to create an exhibition in Brussels (which then travelled to Munich and Vienna), "The Image of Europe" celebrating an end to the EU’s inhibited iconography, its coming out… On two panoramic murals – concentric circles of 60 and 80 meters in length – the evolution of "Europe", as a concept, identity, and political reality, is sketched. The inner ring presents the history of Europe, from continental drift to the Madrid bombing, as an accelerating sequence that gradually gains detail as it approaches the present. Beginning as a sparsely populated archipelago, the pivotal moments of early development – the age of the dinosaur, the Neanderthal, Ancient Greece, Rome – inhabit discreet islands. Arrows indicate the critical interactions with the outside world, particularly with Africa and Asia, that enriched Europe's early civilizations. From there the history plots a cyclical alternation between 'good' and 'bad', idealism and zealotry, through the spread of Christianity, the emergence of modernity, the rise of colonialism and industrialization, nationalism, and eventually the catastrophic violence of the 20th century. Our current moment of uncertainty, affluence, and opportunity provides a provisional climax. The complexities of Europe's past provide a tumultuous foreground against which the outer ring narrates the history of European integration. Starting shortly after World War Two, the story of the European Union – its watersheds and breakdowns, heroes and villains – is, for once, boldly declared. The outer ring attempts to undo 50 years of calculated quiet by turning the EU's non-events into celebrations, its nobodies into heroes, its drabness into grandeur. The story closes somewhere in the 2020s, in a speculative conclusion on Europe's possible future(s). "The Image of Europe" is at once a celebration of the European Union's accomplishments to this point and an exploration into the EU's enormous, as yet untapped potential. It marks a new stage in the Europe's evolution – a denial of understatement in favor of inspiration and engagement. From now on the EU will be bold, explicit, popular... |
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