A flag symbolizes both belonging and exclusion, it marks property and draws a line between nationalities. Martin Nadal uses this symbolism to point out political problems in Europe. With Salvapatrias the artist makes the recurring nationalism movement of Europe visible from a different perspective. In the first stage of his work, he deals with Spanish nationalism, which became more acute in response to Catalonia’s demand for independence.
Salvapatrias confronts the images from real demonstrations with images generated by an artificial intelligence system of automatic images translation. For its training images of Catalan nationalist demonstrations (Illiada 2018) and Spanish nationalist demonstrations (Colón 2019) have been used.
Martin Nadal (BSc) is an artist/creative coder based in Linz and studying the Interface Cultures program. In the past years he has produced a variety of art projects and taught workshops mainly related to money, blockchain and surveillance. His works have been exhibited or produced at: SXSW (us), ZKM (de), IAMAS(jp), CAC(cn), Ars Electronica (at), WRO(pl), Piksel(no), Radical Networks(us).
