This large etching had a number of starting point. One was traditional Chinese scrolls, which account for the style of the mountains in the background. Another was the American Outsider artist Henry Darger's paintings of a similar proportion and shape. My print is also what I would call a playscape, the sort of imaginative universe you spread out in front of you as a child, like a model-railway set. Car windscreens and movie screens have the same shape, that sort of slot vision onto the world.

I made the print for a show I had in Venice. I was interested in the history of the city and its geography, with the Grand Canal splitting it through the centre. That was the starting point for the layout of my battle, which has a loop across it like the canal. Everyone is at war. There are sides but they're pretty indistinct: it's a free-for-all. I made a long list of groups, from Christians, Nazis and Satanists to paranoid conspiracy theorists, animal rights activists and male chauvinist pigs, and then added each group to the drawing at random. Everyone can probably identify with at least one group on here, if not several; it might make them think about who they are and which side they fall on. There's no such thing really as 'us' and 'them'. As soon as one group feels like they have a monopoly on righteousness we are in trouble.

From the very beginning, I had a fantasy of the print hanging on the wall of a politician's office. He might sit thinking, 'Yeah, we're going to get those people!', but then he'd look up at it and realise that it wasn't that simple. It's deliberately multicultural and cross-temporal, so there are men on horseback, First and Second World War aeroplanes and jet fighters. It's nice that one of the prints did end up in the House of Commons art collection and has now been seen by lots of MPs.

Grayson Perry