Adian Paci, still from Centro di Permanenza Temporanea, 2007. video, color, sound, 4'32''
A hurried traveler arrives at a deserted train station, trying to catch a train that is scheduled to depart at that hour—yet there are no trains in sight. A mysterious smiling switchman suddenly appears behind him, holding a small, toy-like, red lantern. After the traveler asks about the train, the switchman goes into a lengthy exposition about the unpredictability of the railroad. No one, he argues, should ever expect to get to board a train, let alone be taken to any destination. Trains might arrive—or not; they might reach the desired destination, or they might change course without notice and drop off passengers at random villages— and most people accept that fate. Some trains, he describes, are designed to simulate movement for weeks, projecting images of landscapes through the windows and then unloading the travelers exactly where they boarded. The best approach, the switchman argues, is to have no expectations and be prepared for anything to happen, or for nothing to happen.
I will come back to this story later.
The video this week of desperate Afghans clinging to a US military plane as it taxied at Hamid Karzai airport in Kabul is bound to become one of the most indelible images of this decade.
It is a symbolic image of defeat of the U.S’s disastrous involvement in foreign wars just like, as it has been pointed out many times already, the photos of the evacuation of Saigon in 1975. The debate around the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan is already acrimonious and will no doubt be interminable, subject to all sorts of blame shifting and arguments both from the left and the right, with lots of rightful criticism from the international community about this bungled endgame and the U.S. larger role in the region. But that post-mortem is already being taken on elsewhere by many well-informed and thoughtful individuals.
What occupies my mind right now are those scenes, captured on video, of the abandonment of the Afghan people, the anguished and suicidal clinging to the fuselage of the plane by some of them as if they were trying to hold on to the back of a bus. It is both the tragic absurdity of that scenario, and a painful illustration of their hopelessness and fear amid the arrival of the Taliban; the certainty by many that their country was gone, and the terrible resignation amongst others that all is lost. It is the meaning of that image and what it represents in terms of the future of Afghanistan.
Airports are powerful sites. They represent freedom and escape, but they can also be oppressive places. Because they are neither here nor there, they are the embodiment of limbo, of life being put on hold. While being in transition, one often has the feeling of not being fully alive. And because of their security infrastructure and the pressure of expedient operation, passengers are often deprived of their humanity, becoming mere entities in movement.
The immigrant experience is shaped partially by that transition, by the powerlessness one feels waiting for powerful forces to come to aid or allow for passage to a safe haven.
This is partially why this week I recalled another airport-related image which is well-known to anyone who is familiar with contemporary art and with the international biennial circuit of the last two decades. It comes from a 2007 video by the Albanian artist Adrian Paci, entitled Centro di Permanenza Temporanea. The video starts with the image of an aircraft airstair. A group of Black and Brown working-class men and women approach it and start climbing. Only then we see that there is no actual plane to board, only the boarding stairs. They remain there in silence, awaiting the arrival of a plane that might or might not come.
I reached out to Adrian Paci to ask him a few questions about this work. I wanted to understand what had prompted him to make this piece, whether an image or a particular experience. He replied: “I was traveling from Milano to San Francisco invited as an artist in residence at Montalvo Art Center and as a guest professor at CCA in San Francisco. I had no idea about what kind of work I could do in Montalvo. Changing flights in Frankfurt I saw at the runway these empty stairs and for a moment I imagined them crowded with people. During the trip from Frankfurt to San Francisco I made the drawings of the storyboard and when I arrived in Montalvo I told the people of the residency that I already have a project. It was not easy but we made it.”
We spoke about the oddity of airports. Paci said: “In all my work the space of transition is very important. There is an unstable zone where things are not fixed but they live in a certain potentiality.”
And we also spoke about travel as part of the immigrant experience. Paci: “Traveling from Albania was impossible during the communist period, and it was very difficult the first years after the collapse of the regime. I remember the long lines to get into the boat and to get out going through a lot of controls, but also the long lines out of the embassies to get the visa…Now it is a bit more easy ( even still complicated) for many Albanians, but the images that these experiences gave me remain still very strong on my memory.”
I am going to avoid the trite Godot references, ubiquitous in art projects of past years. The comparison does not give justice to Paci’s work. The more personal reference that Paci’s video made me think about in reference to the events this week, or rather the first reference of absurd and uncertain fates of travelers for me, comes from El Guardagujas (The Switchman) a short story by Mexican writer Juan José Arreola that I read as a child and of which I have relayed the main plot at the beginning.
The switchman’s calm detailing of the irrational and random behavior of the trains, which seems as if coming out of an anguishing dream, can be interpreted in various ways. One is that it is a parable of the third world: a universe so ungovernable and hopelessly tangled that half of the time things that are supposed to happen never happen and the other half events seem to be controlled by a secret, draconian, bureaucratic and tyrannical force acting with impunity to control the lives of people, in such a totally overwhelming way that there is no use in resisting it. Arreola’s work, while it can be merely interpreted as a critique of the Mexican transportation system, is really a kafkian comment about bureaucracy, or rather, an Existentialist tale about hope.
In its essence, the story draws from a very Mexican trait (albeit not unique to Mexico): humor and satire, a defensive mechanism against injustice, against the absurdity of it all.
Going back to Afghanistan, The New York Times’ The Daily published an audio diary of a woman critic of the Taliban— referred only as “R”— who narrates the fall of Kabul in a haunting series of recordings that go from shock and fear to tears and finally to disbelief:
“I just feel so disappointed. I feel so disgusted. And I feel so enraged, that it’s like a joke. What is happening is like a joke.
And by now, they are inside the city, I think, because I just heard that two minutes ago, they entered the city. And yeah, we lost so many things.
And I’m just losing everything.
And now, I lost my house. I lost my belongings. I lost my city. I lost my country. I lost my dreams.”
Her recordings made me think of how this resonates with what Afghan artist Mariam Ghani also wrote in her work Afghanistan: A Lexicon (2011):
“Over the past century, many things have been lost in Afghanistan: battles, wars, soldiers, standards, grounds, money, advantages, generations, blood, hearing, sight, limbs, lives, livelihoods, land, dreams, dreamers, ideas, ideals, innocence, friends, friendships, parents, children, childhoods, schools, teachers, homes, villages, fields, forests, rivers, roads, bridges, dams, electricity, cities, monuments, paintings, poems, places, earrings, coins, keys, suitcases, maps, plans, plots, ways, means, sanity, reason, levity, proportion, judgment, balance, love, hope. Sometimes what was lost can be recovered, but more often, the lost stays lost.”
While others explain to us and detail the reasons for this tragedy, on the other side we see anguish and desperation and a profound sense of having fallen into an abyss, a state of despondency, of cynicism, of defeat, of ever-waning hopes for a rescue. The question is where to go from that place, like the stranded immigrants at the airport’s tarmac.
It will take more than the preservation of hope, and it will take more than the bravery and resolve of those who have been left behind.
In order to give support in response to the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, visit