Midair Entanglement I (2023)
Midair Entanglement I is situated on a hot air ballon. Carried by
the wind, the hot air balloon is blown into the realm of the
birds, where above and below are easily confused. Swallowed up by
dense clouds, the surroundings slowly but steadily lose their
decipherable features and merge into one. As the balloon rises and
the air is getting thinner, things go awry. The ensuing fall, the
downward pull, is also an inward pull, as shock and adrenaline
induced disorientation take over.
Midair Entanglement II (2024)Midair Entanglement II is inspired by the first scenes of
Andrei Tarkovsky's 1966 movie Andrei Rublev. The film is set
against the background of a christian 15th-century Russia. In its
prologue, a hot air ballon is tethered to a church and being
prepared for a flight. The people preparing the balloon are soon
interrupted by an angry mob. The mob wants to stop them, but the
balloon takes flight anyway, with one man hanging from a harness.
The balloon will crash a few minutes later.
My piece reverses this
scenario, so that instead of taking off from the top of a church
and crashing into the ground, the hot air ballon starts from the
ground, as heard in part one, and lands on a church in part two.
The first part of Midair Entanglement left off with the hot air
balloon still plummeting towards the ground with the protagonist
firing the burner to try to counteract his descent. This is where
Midair Entanglement II takes off. The hot-air balloon and its
pilot, driven by the wind, involuntarily steer towards a church.
The angry mob, which in the film tried to hinder them from flying
away from the church, is now trying to prevent them from landing
on the church and is shooting arrows at the balloon. The church
bells grow louder as the balloon gets closer to the tower until it
is inevitably impaled on the church spire, the protagonist
dangling in the air next to the bell. I interpret the opening
scene from Andrej Rublev as the protagonist distancing himself
from the church and religion. I see the end of this scene, the
crash, not as indicative of a failure in his venture. Instead, his
whole icarean attempt at flight can be interpreted as a creative
effort, which his crash does not undermine. By reversing this
narration I formulate the notion that, enforced by intense moments
of crisis like in this case the plummeting towards the ground,
one's cognition and reasoning can be warped by myth and fiction,
belief and superstition, which drown out certain thoughts while
enforcing others, creating biases and contorting reality.