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 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.
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.