As the tattoo is a mark of our identity, a means of distinguishing ourselves from others, so too the nation state seeks to provide us wherever we live, with a means of identification that separates us from the rest of the human population.
As the nation inscribes upon the landscape the blood and pain of our forebearers, the tattoo inscribes upon our bodies the corporeal suffering of one in the name of establishing an identity as one of many.
Both these processes of inscription are physical and psychological and contribute to the formation of identity based on an idea of community. The tattoo and the nation also share the common necessity of remembrance and forgetting, for as the state asks us to remember the conflicts and bloodshed that have served as defining historical moments, it is this relegation to the past and a realising of a contemporary homogenous narrative that asks us implicitly to forget the circumstances of the narrative’s evolution.
In Canada, this is best manifested by our incorporation of Indigenous visual culture into the broader cultural vernacular. We as Canadians are asked to forget the genocidal and assimilationist campaigns waged in the name of the nation against its Indigenous population and to recognise all citizens as a product of the processes articulated as outcomes of the British North America act that established the Nation of Canada. Ideas such as ‘The Westward Expansion’ neatly cover the trails of blood with a whitewash of progress and nation-building.
The tattoo provides us with an apt metaphor for this process in the way that long after the suffering of the procedure is forgotten, the image written in indelible ink upon the body remains a powerful tribute to the way in which we conceptualise and represent our idea of self.
The practice of patriotic tattooing then comes to be seen as a combination of complimentary ideas of identity, ideas that share a common teleology and ontological function.
Cartography of Imagined Communities is a mapping and performance project that explores the relationship between visual representations and constructions of nation-statehood as articulated through the “art and science” of heraldry and by Political Scientist Benedict Anderson, whose 1983 book Imagined Communities traced the origins of nationalism to the invention and circulation of print culture.
The heraldic logo represents a translation of Anderson’s thesis into heraldic symbology.
Cartography of Imagined Communities was published by Whitewalls Press as part of Useful Pictures edited by Adelheid Mers.
CLICK HERE TO SEE A PDF LAYOUT OF THE PROJECT AS IT APPEARED IN WHITEWALLS
All Photography by Carol Summers.
