TIRANA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT “Mother Teresa”
The Tirana International Airport “Mother Teresa” was recently inaugurated, and is quite an impressive piece of contemporary architecture in which locals take great pride. At the same time, what is most impressive about the airport is its representational value as a non-place place, despite the great specificity and cultural cachet of its name. And it is the encounter of culturally legible subjects with this phenomenon that I will thematize in my project.
My piece will comprise a video that exposes the uncanny ritual of self–exhibition of which the traveler per force participates in order to traverse and successfully pass airport security. For several minutes, I will commit the perfect glocal crime. I will videotape the monitor of a security x-ray machine at Tirana’s airport while it streams the most personal, if not intimate, essentials of international travelers. Underwear, Turkish coffee, lipstick, an Enver Hoxha pin, condoms, a socialist pioneer CD, the Kuran in Albanian, slippers, brandy “Skenderbeu,” a catholic cross, a rock from the beach of Vlora, plastic bunker souvenirs, and so on. How can I distinguish all these things on the monitor of the x-ray machine? Well, I can’t; that’s why I chose it.
As a media painter, I am fascinated by the possibilities of this electronic canvas, as it both aestheticizes the quotidian while abstracting from it, returning our essentials back into color– coded materials and forms. In other words, it is a source that offers the maximum visual impact with the minimum cultural content. By translating a torrent of cultural objects into a wondrous sequence of transparent colorful shapes, compositionally squished within the visual frames of international luggage, the airport x-ray machine is the source and the medium of my painterly, subject. It is a medium that offers even less information that anything McLuhan had ever anticipated.
If the x-ray machine perfects the television’s visual strategy of abstracting reality by utterly reifying it, then the sound track I will add has got to abstract reality by revealing it. So, my video will be accompanied by a sound that walks away from the image in order to find some chards of its soul: i.e., the old Albanian Kaba music.
TIRANA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT “Mother Teresa”
The Tirana International Airport “Mother Teresa” was recently inaugurated, and is quite an impressive piece of contemporary architecture in which locals take great pride. At the same time, what is most impressive about the airport is its representational value as a non-place place, despite the great specificity and cultural cachet of its name. And it is the encounter of culturally legible subjects with this phenomenon that I will thematize in my project.
My piece will comprise a video that exposes the uncanny ritual of self–exhibition of which the traveler per force participates in order to traverse and successfully pass airport security. For several minutes, I will commit the perfect glocal crime. I will videotape the monitor of a security x-ray machine at Tirana’s airport while it streams the most personal, if not intimate, essentials of international travelers. Underwear, Turkish coffee, lipstick, an Enver Hoxha pin, condoms, a socialist pioneer CD, the Kuran in Albanian, slippers, brandy “Skenderbeu,” a catholic cross, a rock from the beach of Vlora, plastic bunker souvenirs, and so on. How can I distinguish all these things on the monitor of the x-ray machine? Well, I can’t; that’s why I chose it.
As a media painter, I am fascinated by the possibilities of this electronic canvas, as it both aestheticizes the quotidian while abstracting from it, returning our essentials back into color– coded materials and forms. In other words, it is a source that offers the maximum visual impact with the minimum cultural content. By translating a torrent of cultural objects into a wondrous sequence of transparent colorful shapes, compositionally squished within the visual frames of international luggage, the airport x-ray machine is the source and the medium of my painterly, subject. It is a medium that offers even less information that anything McLuhan had ever anticipated.
If the x-ray machine perfects the television’s visual strategy of abstracting reality by utterly reifying it, then the sound track I will add has got to abstract reality by revealing it. So, my video will be accompanied by a sound that walks away from the image in order to find some chards of its soul: i.e., the old Albanian Kaba music.