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Notion of a Nation

"Nationalism is an infantile disease.
It is the measles of mankind."
Albert Einstein, letter, 1921

Nations are not in any way organic, natural or given entities. Rather, they are constructed by the will of people and therefore have to be 'imagined'. This does not make them less real in the world, but it does make them a lot more flexible than we may have thought of them during the twentieth century.

With the new milliennium's technological and geographic intermingling of people, we are having to re-explore the original definition of the nation as a group of people who have the desire and agreement to see themselves as one homogeneous group.

Starting from the original premise that a nation is a group of people with a common ancestry, a common history, and often but not exclusively, a common geographic territory, the City Nations project traces disparate cultural trajectories and journeys of people, their customs, objects and lifestyles around the world.