© 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.

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“You can be just as faithful to a place or thing as you can to a person. A place can really make your heart skip a beat, especially if you have to take a plane to get there.”

– Andy Warhol,
from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

© 2007 Emily Ding - Bumbling along the dirt tracks of Masaya, Nicaragua

Metric - Love Is A Place

“If every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning — from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament — and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

And what this metaphor also brings home to us is that all travel is a two-way transaction, as we too easily forget, and if warfare is one model of the meeting of nations, romance is another. For what we all too often ignore when we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are objects of speculation (and even desire) who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us.

[…] And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.”

– travel writer Pico Ayer,
from ‘Why We Travel’

Bjork - Aeroplane

we catch aero planes and ascend the sky while never moving, we learn the brace position as clouds are sucked into engines and the lights that will light our way in the event of an emergency seem to glow with the promise of disaster. but only if you pray hard enough. I look out my window which has rounded edges, because corners catch and cause crashes, and two layers of fibre plastic glass which have tiny spider webbed splinter like cracks which seem to emerge somewhere between 15,000 and 35,000 feet. I watch with dull interest as the cracks seem to grow outwards, and I wonder if falling through clouds would hurt. as I raise my eyes over the chair that sits uncomfortably close to me and I can see rows and rows of heads shifting and turning like flotsam bobbing between waves. I feel confused, as it seems I am going nowhere, each time on a plane is either two things, going to something amazing, or leaving something amazing, and the slice through the sky is dead time in between that is filled with snack boxes and traveltainment. I am not sure when it happened, as I was watching the whole time, but the sky has become darker and the clouds thicker, they look like waves, thick soggy waves, foam, there is no sky between them, we skim along their surface. You cannot comprehend the speed of the plane, but you can feel it, in the pit of your tummy, sucking up hard into your throat as the plane lowers, dropping height even though space holds no value, and the dizzy feeling in your tummy is like the promise of an orgasm in mid air. I watch as we plough through the clouds, they seem like hair perhaps, strands coating the wings of the plane, the clouds shake their crowning glory as the plane explores their folds. out the window now I can see the twinkling lights of your city, I can see your roads and houses as formations of light, light of my life, glowing and pulsing. The blackness in between seems to go on forever, the city floats in the air much like the clouds, I am sure the solidity of life has dispersed quickly in all directions of the universe. I am the only matter. there is no time to think as a twinkle of your eye produces the city and I knock my elbow against the double plane window, I take off my seatbelt despite the lit sign, I swivel in my chair and anchor my back against the armrest, I grit my teeth and bang bang my feet against the window, cracking the plastic, splintering it, and whoosh, here it comes, the air sucks me into your urban nothingness. first my arms emerge from the hole, then my head, and I pull my body long and lean, then my legs eager and heavy and there I am crouching on the wing, the lights in your buildings thrusting to me, your outstretched arms are sky scrapers and my heart explodes. Oh and the spring in my step as I run fast along the wing of the plane, there is no movement but me and the yawning smile of your highways, arms outstretched, eyes wide I jump from the metal wing to the promise of you. down down I fall, and your lights bloom yellow, red and glorious white, the white is the most pure of all, it does not twinkle, it simply ebbs from small to huge as my body falls down to your outstretched arms, your skyscraping fingers, your soft mouth of rivers and the streets that pump your blood and I am only in darkness for a second and I am only whole for a second before the light of your city pierces me through and I sigh with the pleasure of your touch.

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.