If there is an object of universal use and comprehensible to anyone in the world that is the flag. Since the time of the Crusades, flags have represented the belonging of a group of people to a country, but not only, to a belief, an ideal, a current of thought. Think, for example, of pirates, Italian lordships, political parties or the most popular rainbow flag of peace. 

Because of its deep meaning and its powerful symbolic force, Rirkrit Tiravanija, a New York artist born in Buenos Aires, has made the flag an inevitable object of his artistic research. 

One of the best known is completely white, presenting light, almost invisible, the silhouettes of the stars and stripes of the American flag, above them in cubital characters appears the inscription “Fear Eats The Soul“. The sentence is taken from the film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, one of those films that forty years later still manages to be particularly relevant, dealing with themes linked to racism and class struggle. 

The same flag with the phrase in Italian appeared yesterday on the facade of the Church of San Paolo Converso in Milan, headquarters of the Fondazione Converso that will host the works of Rirkrit Tiravanija throughout the year, including six flags that will be waved in turn at the entrance. The first one is “La Paura Mangia L’Anima” (Fear Eats the Soul) and, unfortunately, it couldn’t be better suited to the current climate in the city (and throughout Northern Italy), which is forced to close schools and museums because of the Coronavirus.

Although it remains a white flag, do not mistake it for a gesture of surrender.