Merilyn Fairskye
Stati d’Animo/60 Seconds
00:04:48 2007
Stati d’Animo was shot at Brisbane, Charles de Gaulle, Darwin, Dubai, Frankfurt, Heathrow, Helsinki, Hong Kong, JFK, Kuala Lumpur, Los Angeles, Pudong, San Francisco, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Sofia, Sydney and Vienna airports. The title references the trilogy of paintings (Stati d’Animo, 1911) by the Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni. The international airport replaces Boccioni’s railway station as the principal site of human movement - a zone of passage in which people suspend their usual lives, a place where they experience a heightened mix of emotions, and where they recall other lives in other places.
Airports and their environs are monitored to create a sense of place that is layered with shadows, echoes and reflections. People inhabit this space provisionally, always on the move, lost in their own thoughts. Communications between ground staff and flight crew, airport announcements, interweave with personal stories of loss and new beginnings to form “conversations” that populate the airport. The airwaves are dense with the echoes of human drama.
The formation of the interior airport images in this work closely resembles the sequenced exposures of chronophotography by Jules Etienne Marey (1830-1904) which (like Henri Bergson’s reflections on time) inspired the painterly experiments of the Futurists that this work evokes.
Stati d’Animo exists in several forms – as stills, a video essay, and multi-channel and single-channel video installations.
Writer, director, producer and camera: Merilyn Fairskye.
Post vision and sound: Greg Ferris.
DVD available