Flags of Other Winds: Decay, Resistance, and Infrastructural Entanglements

Abstract

Flags of Other Winds emerges from the artistic research project From the Top of the Mountains We Can See Invisible Monuments (i2ADS – Research Institute in Art, Design and Society) in collaboration with Bandim Cooperative of Immigrant Women in Portugal. Conceived as a series of five textile flags, the work engages with environmental and social transformations provoked by infrastructural development across Europe and South America. Rather than treating decay as disappearance or loss, the project approaches it as a political and aesthetic condition through which social and ecological struggles become visible. The flags—handcrafted through upcycled fabric remnants that carry the migratory trajectories of their makers—perform decay as an active form of resistance. The frayed seams, layered textures, and unstable compositions evoke the disintegration of extractive infrastructures and the emergence of alternative worlds shaped by ethics of collaboration and relational knowledge. Each flag corresponds to a specific territorial and historical context: migration, expulsions and borders; dam collapses and the destruction of communities and ecosystems; reoccupation of exhausted land for the restoration of native cultures and vegetation; infrastructural projects that displaced people and erased histories; and social movements resisting extractivist regimes. These flags are not symbols of nations, but of other winds—winds that carry voices, fragilities, and plural epistemologies that refuse infrastructural violence.

Drawing on Marina Vishmidt’s notion of “infrastructural critique”, the work frames infrastructure not as neutral support but as a site of ideological and material struggle. Here, decay becomes a decolonial methodology: an undoing that reveals the uneven distribution of care, value, and visibility. The collaborative process with the Bandim seamstresses foregrounds an ethics of dissolution, where care is extended toward the fragile, the residual, and the transforming. Through this collective making, the project reimagines custodianship as an open-ended negotiation between material decay, political resistance, and shared imagination. Flags of Other Winds thus proposes an alternative heritage practice that embraces impermanence and interdependence. It understands decay not as an endpoint but as a condition of life—a site where broken infrastructures, displaced bodies, and fragmentary memories coalesce into new forms of solidarity and ecological consciousness.