Hito Steyerl.

In Free Fall

Date: 2010
Length: 32:00 min.
Format: 16:9
Specifications: Colour, Sound, Single Channel
Courtesy the artist

An aircraft cemetery in the Californian desert is the setting of an economical catastrophe; it acts as the symbolic end and beginning of all materiality. In her three-part film, modelled on Sergej Tretiakov’s “Biography of an Object” (1929), artist and film maker Hito Steyerl shows us the biography of the aircraft 4X-JYI (a Boeing 707-700). Using both fictional and documentary material, she sketches its manufacture, various stations and operational assignments and, following its dismantling, the remarkable afterlife of its material. In the course of this undreamt of relationships between aeronautical and financial crash landings, modes of production, the logic of economic utilisation, recycling processes and the circulation of pictures unfold themselves. The editing of the film lends it a narrative, almost danceable rhythm, whose pulse is determined by a colourful arrangement of clips. The crash metaphor and free fall are illustrated both by the collage of fragments of material and by the dynamic cycle in which the materials are scrapped and reused. Aestheticised pictures of an explosion are repeated, opening a new beginning and acting as a visual refrain of the video work. In one scene the artist suffers from a slip of the tongue: Instead of “the materials live further” she reads “the materials love further”. This subconscious slip emphasises the irrational relationship between person and object.

Lisa Arndt und Dorina Köbele-Milas