About Hoisted

In collaboration with the local community, Inkahoots identifies and researches a curated list of local plants and animals related to the installation site. These are presented on the Hoisted flag-building web-app with unique visual assets and information enabling users to create a flag based on their chosen species. These user-generated flags are then projected on site and are also collected and archived on the website (even when installation is not live).

We see Hoisted as a kind of parallel cultural play to the legal rights-of-nature movement. In New Zealand, and elsewhere, mountains, rivers and forests have been granted legal personhood to give them visibility and protection under the law.

Western legal systems have always treated nature as property, so the rights-of-nature approach shifts the legal status of nature from property to a subject with inalienable legal rights. Roger Stone's 1972 article Should Trees Have Standing? reminds us of the relatively recent granting of legal status to children, women, prisoners, First Nations peoples, even the legal personification of corporations.

Inkahoots have developed a critical theoretical manoeuvre we're calling vexillografting. If vexillography is the established practice of flag design, vexillografting is the strategic transfer of meaning using the persuasive symbolic power of flags to champion neglected yet fundamental priorities.

Can vexillografting help induce a psychological shift of personal value priorities? Can it help us think differently and personalise our connection to the natural world? Can it help us deflate western religious myths of dominion by inspiring recognition of our mutual interdependence?

After all, Eucalypts have been in Australia for at least 20,000,000 years, humans for around 60,000 years. The first flag was flown here a mere 250 years ago. The raising of the Union Jack ignored ancient occupation. But sovereignty has never been ceded by Indigenous Australians, and the Australian Aboriginal Flag was officially recognised only 25 years ago.

Likewise, the flora and fauna of Australia has been rejected, displaced and exploited, with the relatively short period of European colonisation seeing the highest rate of mammalian extinction in the world. What if we could fully embrace and learn from Australia’s first peoples’ millennia custodianship, respect and continuing care of country? What if we also acknowledged the sovereignty of Australian plants and animals? What would their flags look like? Could the vexillological stigma of the first flag unfurling ever be sublimated by redirected regalia?

For example, in a perverse act of sad nostalgia Tasmania's coat of arms poses two extinct thylacines guarding a shield. Queensland's animal emblem is the Koala which is functionally extinct in parts of Queensland due to loss of habitat.

But what if our flora and fauna had their own symbols of sovereignty? What if they could escape the semiotic servitude of state symbolism? Before it's too late, in the face of mass extinction driven by climate change and the ravaging of the environment – before homo sapien's flags are forever lowered to half-mast – what if other species' flags were hoisted high?

***