THE FLAGS

Artist Angus Watt has has been making colourful interventions at WOMAD with flags for over 25 years. Designed, handmade and installed by him and his crew of seamstresses and riggers each year, let's take a minute to appreciate these keystones of WOMAD festivals worldwide!

"The interplay between light colour and movement offered by simple fabrics has fascinated me ever since I first worked with them in the early 1990s.

This evolved into the idea to put up flags en-masse in a large natural space (appearing as if by magic). Preserving an anonymity and mystery about the flags was part of this idea, kind of like doing  graffiti… so that a random viewer would happen across the flags with no information around and have an up-lifting  but  slightly perplexing experience.

A natural synergy  came with music at the Womad 1994 festival in Reading, where the flags first appeared significantly. It proved to be an irresistible combination of elements in a classic festival environment: music, colour, movement... a zeitgeisty collaboration with WOMAD that continues to the present…

When I’m asked ‘what do they stand for? ’ in these darkening days my answer is: they are literally a ‘standard’ , standing for the Good Things: for quality, conviction, positivity, equality, the real... and by definition also  stand opposed to Bad Things: cynicism, blandness, cultural appropriation, commercialism, and against all these negative influences that are eroding culture everywhere."

- Angus Watt