© Emily Ding - Stansted Airport, London

John Mayer - Wheel

An excerpt from Starting Points and Destinations, an honours research paper by Marlaina Read:

The airport is a place where journeys begin and end. These are the places that I start feeling like a traveller. In the airport I feel a sense of dislocation, it comes, I think, from knowing that there are hundreds of airports just like this one all around the world. I cannot be intimate with a location that is constantly repeated because it does not exist as an individual place. The structure of the airport does not require individuality in order to function. Its production of repetition and homogeneity is the basis for its efficiency worldwide because it creates an order through which people’s movements can be controlled smoothly. Any intimacy I could want to feel in this space would, therefore, be swallowed in the airport’s overwhelming sameness. This is a space that serves to move people on their way, it does not exist of and for itself, but instead only as a means of delivering people to their destination. The airport is a place of transition; it does not need to describe history or culture because no one is coming to the airport to be at the airport. They come to the airport in order to leave. The airport is what Marc Auge calls a non-place.

* * *

The airport is not Australia. Lines, waiting, inspections, you have to be cleansed before entering and leaving the country. But cleansed of what? Stamps, officials and bizarre mini-landmarks take up your time. The distraction of the airport consists of wondering where other people are going, thinking about excess baggage allowances, calculating how far to carry your baggage before you reach gate 57. I am part of the process of the airport, I am a transacting partner, and I am a number. I close my eyes and can think of home. Duty free is a right not a privilege. I think about currency exchange, people in suits, crying partners. The airport is strange because it allows both incredible outpourings of emotion and also complete separation from all other humans.

I am alone.

Boarding the plane I am greeted by smiling men and women; they are used to navigating the world. Look at their smiles, there is no confusion here. They know where they are, what language to speak. But it is not their job to have a holiday, or to visit friends, to study, to attend the conference. They do not travel to countries, or to cities. They travel to the other airport; it is as if they have never left home. You are a guest on their crazy home in the sky. “56b, second row and turn right please,” smile, smile.

I am seated beside a large man, who has to sit at the aisle seat because his legs are too large to fit in the seating allotment. A skinny scowling girl, who gets the window seat, but keeps the shade drawn through the whole flight, joins us. I am sad. I wanted to take pictures out the window as we flew over cities and countries and continents, high in the air. The air is borderless, you can be above a country, but not bound by their laws. The laws of your arrival destination bind you. From Sydney to Bangkok I am lawfully in Bangkok. The same from Bangkok to London. The air is all about destination. You have left behind that other country. It is all about the future. Effectively you are flying toward the future, you are a time traveller with your choice of video entertainment and chicken curry or beef burgundy. In the air you have choices, even though you are so surely contained they want you to feel like you are in control. In control of where I am. In control of who I am, and in control of who I will be when I arrive.

Tegal airport in Berlin is pure constructivism. I feel like I am in a machine that is nearing the production line end, waiting to spit me out into this foreign place. It feels like I have not left home, in my mind I am still there. It has only been a day since I last saw my friend last saw that street. All of a sudden (you are never prepared for the open doors at the other side) it is cold, dark and different, the transition from place to non-place back to place again is disorientating. Auge describes disorientation as a product of a plurality of place, whereby one on a journey experiences so many places they are unable to complete an observation and as such are forced to experience a discontinuity of narrative. No time for contemplation the traveller seeks to complete their memory with post-journey narratives such as a collection of photographs.

I feel lost already.

The effect of disorientation that travel produces - this non-intimate experience of the non-place - needs to be regained through an experience of place. Existing in a physical place does not mean you inhabit it in your psychological reality. People describe this as a feeling of emptiness, of feeling lost and out of place; sometimes it is expressed as an inability to “connect” with your surroundings (perhaps they are not connecting with you?) Yet you can take that same psychological mindset to another physical location and feel totally at home.

About the author:
Marlaina Read has a degree in Visual Arts from the Sydney College of Arts, and during her student years she also spent half of 2004 in Berlin. Photographically, she is interested in the sublime and nothingness, in cinema, in children, in everyday rituals, in places and spaces and memory. She wants to be a teacher and an artist. You can find her online at invisiblecity.org.