Airport Projects 2006

The series Airport Projects reflected the artist’s personal and poetic investigation of transitional spaces between static territorial coordinates. Airports and their surrounding surveillance bureaucracy of state borders are designed in a very distinguishable way, clinic and official they become a new typology of institutions of power. Cibic’s Airport Projects present a body of work – a number of installations and performances that exist only as photographic documents of singular actions within a specific space.

Within all the works, the artist has used elements characteristic of the typology of space itself (border controls, police presence, official welcoming choreographies of the state apparatus…) and reformatted them into new compositions which suggest poetic insertion of rectified ready-mades into the otherwise rigid surveillance space.

The JC01/Lufthansa series of photographs displays interventions within passenger aeroplanes where hunting trophies from the artist’s grandfather’s collection are presented on the aircraft’s wall as if in a trophy room reminiscent of the idea of displaying collections of artworks or other valuables.

In the Boutique Airports series the artist creates elaborated staged actions, which were realised within functioning airports during their operating hours and where the only spectators were the actual users of the space itself. The Boutique Airports I was produced in collaboration with the Slovene State Police Cavalry, where a landing strip of Ljubljana airport was fabricated and inserted within the landscape whereas Boutique Airports II presented a staged welcoming committee with a brass band set up at the airport. An empty aeroplane was brought in front of the airport’s viewing platform, a red carpet unrolled and the brass band performed as a looped sound sculpture for the empty aeroplane.