Flight bags and the unexpected

 

 

If you are a passenger on any flight you'll find them in front of you close to the flight magazine. Uniform and unattractive. To be used in emergency cases, to cover up the expectoration - just in case. The case is tending towards nil nowadays: the bags, however, are there and often their only adornment is the name of the airline.

This was intriguing for me. In my meanwhile years long artistic tasks I'm looking into “neglected” items of our every day life , pull them out of their corners and cohesion and re-arranges them into an art environment inspired by nature and projected into a new art space contextualizing the created art installation with its former environment, with creative processes, with a suggested sustainability formed and guarded by the artist.

Somehow I feel that these bags belong to the passengers, even more, the bags may stand for each of the passengers and his very personal disposition at that particular flight. And as there is a huge variety of people on each flight, I felt myself called upon to individualize each of the bags to suggest the uniqueness of the passenger it was meant for. You may find the joyous, adventures expecting tourist, the anxious student on his first flight to a foreign university. You may find the laborer on his way to a Gulf state, the business man carrying an important decision with him, the child with a name board around his neck on his way from his parents to the grand parents, the artist on his way to a glorious performance or the summoned employee on the way to his headquarters, the boxer envisaging already his defeat. Each bag intends to suggest these differences, the individual behind the traveler. Out of the uniformity of bags – neglected and unused- I've tried to suggest the multiplicity of human conditions.

 

Once again I present objects that in their pristine appearance are well known to the viewer, but then I changed, altered and re-arranged them in an artistic process to create an astonishing new, artistically impressive display of aesthetic invitations in the eyes of the beholders.

 

As a modern nomad I’ve been traveling in all directions with plenty of airlines and have collected these bags one by one together with the stories told by my neighbours that provides into an even closer relationship to each of my bags on display covering an entire wall. I have normally integrated the airlines name – already printed on the bag – into the created new artistic space.

 

It is my wish that one day the airlines may place these bags back into their pockets on the front seats.

 

 

Cora de Lang