AIRPLANE CONFESSIONAL

Curated by Aaditya Aggarwal

Talkback with Helen Lee, Christene Browne, and Rolla Tahir

Saturday, March 15 2025, 5pm

CineCycle, 129 Spadina Ave., Toronto, ON M5A 1J7

"Airplane Confessional" is a program themed on the filmic travelogue, featuring works by Jason Britski, Christene Browne, Helen Lee, Ann Marie Fleming, Razan AlSalah, Charlie Egleston, Rolla Tahir, Gariné Torossian, and Christina Battle. This presentation is curated by Archive/Counter-Archive Artist-in-Residence Aaditya Aggarwal.

AIRPLANE CONFESSIONAL

“Where did the illuminations go? Should we forever be in transition, transitional transitions, not having known the beginning, big bang or whisper, and doomed not to see the end?”

— Etel Adnan, Paris, When It’s Naked, 1993

“The more comfortable the flight, the more obscurely miserable I would be, for it weighs heavily upon my kind that we could perhaps not make it by wagon.”

— Joan Didion, "Notes from a Native Daughter," Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968

“Oh, the hard work all of this is, and is it any wonder, then, that on your return home you feel the need of a long rest, so that you can recover from your life as a tourist?”

— Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place, 1988

"I could not see anything clearly on the way in from the airport, even though there were lights everywhere."

— Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, 1990

“the future person has amnesia. marked by one strong incident — that of being left/ airport/ train station/ buses/ you would see this woman at these places.”

“at the airport what was an airport woman dressed in uniforms grey waiting eternal looking down from the balcony below the passengers leave” (White Dust from Mongolia, Related Poems and Journal Entries)

— Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Exilee and Temp Morts: Selected Works, 1980

In these diaristic travelogues, homegoing is a hazard, its cadence a pilgrimage, its carriage a womb. A skyward passenger becomes a somnambulistic protagonist. A foreigner periodically levitates in avian suspension, then sinks into fluvial submergence. A returnee first avoids the airport, then promptly decides to leave. An exilee captures images while in transit, harnessing filial kinship with the departed. Their snapshots, in the words of film essayist Chris Marker, “claim remembrance on account of their scars.” 

Infused with the airborne stupor and lightheaded candour of a travel memoir, while nodding to the historic tradition of landscape film, these first-person accounts of exile and return embroider the confessional "I" of "id" into foraged terrains of the mind. Conjuring the writings of Etel Adnan, Jamaica Kincaid, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Anne Carson, and Joan Didion, the flâneur of these films way-finds, in looping mistrust, often in the aftermath of violation or with the inheritance of dispossession, flitting between cursory points of memory (departure) and epiphany (arrival). Journal entries and oral retellings score aerial views of cumulus clouds and street views of gliding country—transiting the fresh arrivals at Pearson, recounting the sanctuary of pre-invasion Kuwait, dwelling among ghosts in the military base at Dongducheon, searching through a satellite view of Haifa, rerouting to the inky mountains of Moush. From the unreturned kith to the reunited kin, these travel diaries record collateral incantations, recalibrating, if not upending, circadian rhythms altogether. The dirge of slumber and the rush of dawn, turn to coriolis force in a causal aircraft, voicing the migratory nocturne of a jetting layover.

— Aaditya Aggarwal

This project was developed with the support of Archive/Counter-Archive, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and CFMDC.

• Exteriors, Jason Britski, 1999, 16mm, 4 minutes

• From Nevis To…, Christene Browne, 1987, 16mm, 7 minutes

• Subrosa, Helen Lee, 2000, video, 22 minutes

• You Take Care Now, Ann Marie Fleming, 1989, 16mm, 11 minutes

• Your father was born 100 years old, and so was the Nakba, Razan AlSalah, 2017, digital, 7 minutes

• Travel Film, Charlie Egleston, 2001, Beta SP NTSC Digital File, 9 minutes

• Sira, Rolla Tahir, 2018, 16mm, 6 minutes

• Girl From Moush, Gariné Torossian, 1993, 16mm Beta SP NTSC, 5 minutes

• the distance between here and there, Christina Battle, 2005, 16mm, 8 minutes

Please note that one of the above works includes a verbal account of sexual violence and medical injury. Some works also use strobing techniques and fast-paced camerawork.

Image: Subrosa, Helen Lee, 2000.