Raised

2020, Animated GIF

Some images become so large they stop being images. They become symbols, monuments, reflexes. We no longer see them — we only recognize them. Raised takes one of those images and does something small to it. It keeps everything: the hill, the wind, the bodies straining together, the weight of the pole, the precise angle of collective effort. It changes only the flag they are raising.

The soldiers do not know. Their muscles are committed to the same act. Their sacrifice is real, their exhaustion is real, their solidarity with each other is real. None of that is questioned.

What the work questions is what that force was pointed at — and whether it could be pointed somewhere else. To resymbolize is not to erase. It is to ask: what if this same energy, this same willingness to struggle together toward something, had been raised in the name of peace? The image does not become a lie. It becomes a possibility.

Monuments are not facts. They are choices. And choices can be remade.