All images from the series A Circle of 12 Gold Stars on a Blue Background © Jan Staiger.
Taking the familiar blue and gold tropes that represent the European Union, the German-born photographer explores the visuality of the complex constructs of the Commission with his project A Circle of 12 Gold Stars on a Blue Background
Depictions of the European Union are often limited to a handful of recurring themes – close-ups of European Commission leaders on podiums, renderings of glass-heavy institutional building facades, obsessive picturings of the Union’s waving blue flag. Jan Staiger is attempting to photograph the bureaucratic machinery of the EU with the same image conventions, his project A Circle of 12 Gold Stars on a Blue Background restaging the Union’s determined types, while flipping its visual language.
Created across four European countries – Belgium, Germany, France and Greece – A Circle of 12 Gold Stars on a Blue Background traces the tropes of EU political communication. Idealised self-images and self-picturings, these representations are often far from the realities of the place. “I see the European district in Brussels as a sort of imaginary political green screen,” says Staiger, who was born in the German city Nuremberg, but is now based in Brussels, where the EU has its headquarters. “If you walk 20 minutes further, you see all the issues European capitals face displayed on the street.”
“I see the European district in Brussels as a sort of imaginary political green screen” – Jan Staiger
Staiger’s photographic record is constrained, partly through necessity. While working in European Commission buildings, photographers are watched by press officers, he says, adding, “you’re never alone”. They are also forced to follow the Commission’s protocols as laid out in its Visual Identity Manual. Staiger turns these protocols against themselves, his images made ghostly by sharp artificial light, the staged EU regalia emptied of its performative energy.
In one striking shot, 10 blue balloons – each printed with the ring of 12 gold stars – bob in the rough waters off Lesbos, Greece. The island has been central to EU migration policy since 2015, when it became an arrival point for hundreds of thousands crossing from Turkey. Staiger’s balloons read as iconographic buoys, EU symbolism set adrift within the migration crisis its politics have yet to resolve.
Staiger began A Circle of 12 Gold Stars on a Blue Background during his MA studies at KASK School of Arts in Ghent, and the series perhaps takes its most concentrated form in his book of the same name. Designed around the European Commission Visual Identity Manual, it is bound like an official document stack, and carries the title in all 24 official EU languages. The publication’s laser-cut cover references an overlooked alternative design for the European flag, stars scattered in the member states’ rough geographical positions, not the neat, equalising circle there is today.
This alternative flag hints at Staiger’s hopes for the EU and its visual representation, which is for reform not complete overhaul. “I’m not naive,” he says. “I cannot change an entire media landscape.”
