Opening 2003 - South London Gallery, Londres, UK. Duration: 20min Written and Directed: La Ribot. Camera and Live Editing: Gilles Jobin. Mastering: Dominique Rivoal. Produced by 36 Gazelles-La Ribot, London, with the support of Arts Council England. Thanks to Finnair. An Artsadmin associated project.
Video
Various video works by La Ribot (Pa amb tomàquet, 2000, Travelling, 2003, or Mariachi 17, 2009, for instance) explore what happens when the performer holds the video camera and records the piece from the point of view of his or her own body. In London/Helsinki, 2003, the “performer” is not a person but a plane flying between the U.K. and Finland, and the spectacular footage we see comes from a camera located under its nosecone.
The video compresses the trip into a ten-minute span. Aerial views of outer London’s traffic arteries, suburban sprawl and light-industrial detritus give way to a glowing evening cloudscape, and then the plane cruises down onto the fiery lights of Helsinki’s nighttime runway.
However, there’s a twist, since (like parts of Mariachi 17) this is actually a video-within-a-video: it’s been shot from a monitor on the back of a passenger seat during an in-flight screening. Hence its various visual distortions and its soundtrack, which features all the familiar ambient noise of air travel: seatbelt signs coming on, soothing musak, background chatter, the inevitable grizzling baby, and a particularly jittery passenger’s nervous laughter as the plane zooms into the air.