Trigger
Point
Kerstin Honeit:
How to Say Goodbye?
As someone with a fear of flying,
I certainly wouldn’t have
picked on my own the theme
of ‘Tegel Airport’ and its ‘farewell’
as a subject. However,
when I thought about the
farewell and my fear of flying,
I suddenly saw the connection
in the ‘goodbyes’ on
different levels: farewell and
goodbye from the airport itself
and my own fear of a final
farewell in a crashing plane.
I interviewed passengers at
Tegel Airport about their own
ways of ‘saying goodbye’ and
how to go about it. Looking
back on the material I assume
most people related to
this subject, as they were in
transit themselves, with the
idea of saying goodbye to
other people rather than to
an airport or a part of Berlin’s
post-war history or even to an
architectural ideology.
But I wonder if the difference
between bidding farewell to
an idea or to another human
being is that big. The way to
deal with loss seems to be
the concept of the revisiting
no matter who or what the
subject is – the coming back
and the ‘seeing you again’.
For my practice in general,
and in the making of How to
say goodbye? specifically,
I use a method that implies
a type of revisiting by using
the technique of lip-synching
or film-dubbing industry, where practically every foreign-language film is translated and dubbed, there is always a time-lapse between the actual filming in Hollywood and German voic-es being added to the bodies of American actors – German voices revisit the Hollywood scenes, so to speak.
For this piece I literally took the idea of revisiting voices from the past – in the case of this video it was a week between the audio record-ing and the filming – by also revisiting the places at the airport where the interviews took place and embodying the absent interviewees.