Maxims is a series of six white flags, each bearing stylized text written based on the speeches of the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. The work consists of six flags, 54" x 39”, each with formal arrangements of lines of text. Each of these texts was written by the use of a modified cut-up technique, consisting of selection of text fragments and their subsequent recombination, to ‘re-write’ Mussolini speeches into poetic form, to be inscribed on the flags in fonts based on Italian fascist architecture and futurist poetry. The work is to be presented on flag poles, in any variety of ways (standing, wall hung, etc.). These poetic rewrites focus on the conception of nation and land as gendered, as well as the sexual shorthand used to express identity and how those are linked to libidinal economies, or politics of desire and attraction, in a selection of Mussolini’s speeches. The work takes on these shorthands in a more explicit way to express the seductive language of sexuality that underpins the conceptions of nation and domination (put forward by Mussolini). By making these sexual undertones explicit, the work attempts firstly, to make them known, and secondly make them absurd and sickening, thereby embodying a critique. What these poems reveal is the coding of the military as masculine and territory as feminine, showing an expansionist drive and sensual logic of conquest and domination; a technique that creates the impression of naturalness of military action and acts as ‘soft power’, a kind of power based on attraction and co-option as opposed to coercion, playing off of libidinal economies to be desirable and enjoyable, both as action and identity concepts.