The Chancellery, Berlin
‘Does God Live In The No-Fly Zone’ is a photographic and sound installation examining the zoned, nationalised and policed space above us.
SE Barnet and The KIT Collaboration take a look at the restricted airspace above the dwellings of selected Heads of States in cities such as London, Berlin (see above), Paris and Moscow. Their images capture the act of looking up into the nationalized sky, a space of covert restrictions, surveillance, threat and anxiety. The photographs are accompanied by Symphony for No Fly Zones, a 12 hour audio work. This uses layers of national anthems, slowed and transformed into a textured sonic universe.
No-Fly Zones open up vertical channels from the earth, gateways for ascension. The notion of looking for a deity or God in a No-Fly Zone is absurd and futile, as futile as the creation of territorial boundaries in the sky, exemplified by the aerial transgressions witnessed globally during 9/11 of 2001. The search for a higher being in a military zone questions the ascendancy of military space over religious space. The sky was once an expansive territory, which was theoretically structured by religious doctrine. Now, it is filled with the verse and chapter of the military industrial complex. Has a collective notion of ascension lost its impetus due to the implementation of a set of military markers that splice the sky and render the trajectory of the escape velocity as a restricted ‘no man’s land’?
Whitehall, London
Kremlin, Moscow
Matignon, Paris
SEBarnet 