Electric Red: Status Flag

Status is a project by design collective Electric Red for Open, the Russian Federation Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale. To celebrate the renewed pavilion and reflect on the notion of collective belonging, Electric Red developed an interactive flag which functions both as a spatial expedient to highlight the architectural renovation, and as a symbol for institutional renewal, interpreted as a multifaceted character with a physical, digital, and social body.

“Status is a flag that represents us all. Everybody can influence its final appearance. We have created a website where you can pick a color and add it to the flag. Throughout the day, the colors line up one after another. Like any action in the world, the change of colors does not happen in a vacuum. A gradient appears on the website between every two colors. We really like this mechanism of collaboration and mutual influence—the bigger the gap between the two voices, the longer the color gradient. And every day begins from a new line. Thus emerges a large multicolored fabric, which will be printed anew at the end of the Biennale and displayed in the pavilion.”

—Nastya Vishnyakova and Svyat Vishnyakov, founders of Electric Red

“This flag is a sort of anti-flag. On the one hand, it does stand as a representation or a symbol for a collectivity that exists around the Russian pavilion, but it also embodies and exercises the self-questioning that the Russian pavilion embodies. The flag has two ‘bodies’: one is the physical entity, which is the flag displayed in the pavilion, and the second is a digital one that can be accessed both from a phone in the pavilion and from the website. All in all, it embodies our attempt to play with physical and digital environments as a testing ground for possible ways of existing collectively through a fluid multitude.”

—Erica Petrillo, co-curator of Open

Electric Red

Electric Red is a New York-based studio founded by Svyat Vishnyakov and Nastya Vishnyakova in 2020, specializing in art direction, identity, typography, and editorial design.

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