Treaty - Article 50
Personal project
Exhibited at Yvon Lamber Library, 2019
Molded and engraved on white concrete.
The Egyptian–Hittite peace treaty (1274 BC), also known as the Eternal Treaty is one of the first written treaty in human history. In 1907, the German archaeologist Hugo Winckler excavated the site of the Hittite capital, Hattusa (now Boğazkale in Turkey) and found engraved stones pieces which was comfirmed as the peace treaty of Ramesses II and Hattušiliš II. It is known as one of the most important official "international" peace treaties between two great powers from the ancient Near East.
This project depicts the act of re-contextualising online treaty into an archaic process and medium.
Brexit is the greatest disaster to befall the European Union (EU) in its 60-year history but the referendum in which British voters opted to leave the bloc does not automatically signal the country's exit. Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon gives any EU member the right to quit unilaterally, and outlines the procedure for doing so. It gives the leaving country two years to negotiate an exit deal and once it's set in motion it can't be stopped except by unanimous consent of all member states. No country has ever left the EU before, and there was no way to legally leave the EU before the Treaty of Lisbon was signed in 2007.
The idea that a country could leave the EU was therefore thought already in 2007. Almost ten years later, it came back to surface, from the archive of the European Union official website. The very act of engraving a text has a symbolic meaning, a collective preciousness and reminder. Something we lost in the internet.
Nowadays treaties are found and will be only find online. They can be printed from anywhere in the world. Here, the only physical treaty of the Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, engraved on casted white concrete block.