Trigger
Point
Dale Holmes
Gary Simmonds
Landing at Tegel/
Concrete (Fata Morgana)
Landing at Tegel/Concrete
(Fata morgana) is a video
work which references the
opening scene of Werner
Herzog’s Fata Morgana (1971)
and the physical architecture
of Tegel airport and in particular
its Hexagonal terminal
building.
The video is an assemblage of
six pieces of footage showing
planes coming in to land
at Tegel Airport, Berlin. All the
footage is shot from seats
above the wing, the viewfinder
trained upon the wingtip, as
taken from existing material
uploaded to YouTube by air
travel enthusiasts. Re-filmed,
these video sequences have
an analogue quality that
serves to objectify the image.
The focus on the aeroplanes’
wing drag devices moving on
the planes descent echo the
geometrical complexity of
the architectural structures.
This is compounded by the
grainy, solarised and saturated
surfaces of the piece, echoing
textures and surfaces of the
terminal building – the gaudiness
of the duty free shop, the
Tommy Hilfiger outlet and the
billboard-sized watch adverts.
The aviation enthusiast’s
obsessive eye for technology
and detail is denied through
processes which abstract and
disrupt.
These sequences are interspersed
with six still images of
the overlooked and contingent
details of the airport’s architecture,
an architectonic structure
that acts to punctuate
the temporal flow of the flight
sequences and introduce a
fixed spatial disruption that
draws to an end the fantasy of
escape and liberty associated
with air travel and movement
in late capitalism.
These moments of coming in
to land and the concrete walls
of the still images are suggestive
of an end or final phase
– the closure of an airport – in
which any romanticised image
of air travel as an idealised
escape is made redundant by
the crushing realism of having
our feet on the ground.