Aeroflux

I surveyed the territory around the airport area of Paris-Charles de Gaulle. I cross interchanges, the airport, building sites, fields, villages, a detention center, a burned street, the N104 national road under renovation, a motorcycle racing track, the traces of an evacuated roma camp, warehouse docks…

Throughout its history, anti-airport activism has claimed some victories (see Direct Action on the wetlands safeguarded thanks to the autonomous ZAD zone in Notre-Dame-des-Landes) and suffered many defeats (as experienced by farmers forcefully evicted to make way for the construction of the Narita airport, in Shinsuke Ogawa’s series Sanrizuka). In Aeroflux, Nicolas Boone bikes his way around the network of motorways that loop around Charles-de-Gaulle airport. At his own peril, he rides between freight trucks and barbed-wire fences, testing the limits of what is allowed or even possible, making his way along new sections, shoulder stops, central reservations and ghost towns, riding around police stations and detention centres, parking lots and illegal dumps, and across all sorts of rural areas now dedicated to intensive monoculture farming. As Boone follows the robotic indications churned out by his GPS, the eye of his camera-bike takes in the contradictory injunctions coming from the planes, trains, motorbikes, joggers, and pedestrians that enter its field of vision. Using a first-person point of view, this psycho-geographic stroll welcomes “blurry and shaky images, inattention, accidents, falls, crosscuts, sidelines, anomalies, wanderings, daydreams, poetry, exhaustion, joy against symmetry, speed, efficiency, optimization, technology, the mechanical, the neutral”. Faced with a landscape designed to replace the living with commercial flows, Aeroflux embraces a performative and processual approach.

Antoine Thirion