A Nation is a Label
If Marcel Broodthaers was alive and living in contemporary Scotland, how would he critique Scottish nationalism in the digital era?
Marcel Broodthaers’s critique of nationalism emerged in a cultural context in which meaning was largely produced and stabilised by discrete, authoritative institutions such as museums, archives, and national collections. His fictional museums function by parasitising the authority of these institutions, exposing how nationalism is produced through classification, display, and administrative language.
However, in a digital culture characterised by distributed authorship, rapid circulation, and algorithmic organisation, nationalism is no longer produced primarily through institutional frameworks alone. National symbols, narratives, and affects now circulate through networked platforms where authority is fragmented, participatory, and often opaque. As a result, the museum no longer functions as the primary generator of national meaning, but rather as a site where meaning is retrospectively stabilised and legitimised.
Rather than repeating Broodthaers’s strategy of fictionalising the museum to expose its authority, my project addresses the contemporary condition in which institutional authority operates in an era of digital circulation rather than before it.