The city of Trabzon sits on the coast of the Black Sea, 100 miles from Georgia and 200 miles from Iran, at the south-east corner of Turkey. With one foot in Europe and another in Asia, Turkey is, geo-politically, an apt location for Ergin Cavusoglu to focus on in his 2006 work Point of Departure. The six-screen video installation is shot at both Trab–zon and Stansted airport in England, gateways at opposite ends of what Cavusoglu terms ‘the European idea’. His camera follows two travellers: one a Turkish graduate student touching down in England on his way ‘further west’, and the other a British journalist on her way to the Middle East.
Airports are often seen as quintessential non-places – halls through which somnambulant travellers are ushered with as little fuss as the architects and ground staff can arrange. Having passed through passport control and baggage-check into ‘air side’, you are technically neither in a country nor out of it. Cavusoglu’s installation played on this indeterminacy, emphasized by a soundtrack in which the background noise of echoing footfalls, trolleys, squeaks and electronic beeps forms a relentless aural cloud over the work. The real subject of his work, however, is not globalized homogeneity but difference, articulating the specifics of place through details. By focusing on hair-styles, signage, tea and manners he picks out visible flotsam that reveals the cultural undercurrents passing beneath the surface.
Like the projection of an X-ray luggage scanner screen which sends translucent images of personal effects across the gallery floor, Cavusoglu’s footage deliberately evokes the cold stare of the CCTV image. The two characters in the film are actors, and their studiedly casual behaviour is that of people who know they are under surveillance, doing their best to act naturally. Cavusoglu’s method is one of emulation; in recording the airport he adopts its techniques of monitoring, recreating its atmosphere of listlessness edged with paranoia. Unlike Mark Wallinger’s transcendental airport video Threshold to the Kingdom (2000), Point of Departure is not an easy work to watch. It was impossible to see all six screens simultaneously, and the viewer had to shift around the space for the 32 minutes of its duration, enduring the fatigue of audio-visual bustle while waiting for the narrative scraps that infrequently emerge.
A similar sense of watchfulness pervades Adrift (2006), in which two adjacent pairs of projections play out footage shot in Europe (Antwerp Station is occasionally recognizable) and the USA (New York and Rhode Island). Journeys again provide an unambiguous meta-theme; yachts and aeroplanes edge slowly across the screen; cities are filmed from the windows of moving trains. Cavusoglu uses these motifs to knit together a visual essay on the transport of ideas and taste. Antwerp’s station, built by Louis Delacenserie in 1905, is famously pompous, borrowing Renaissance, Moorish, and Byzantine styles in its magpie pursuit of grandeur. New York’s Carnegie Hall and the New England mansions that Cavusoglu films, built by 19th-century industrialist settlers, are no less indebted to European ideas of refinement and prestige in their form and purpose. A simple, repetitive soundtrack (a few notes borrowed from Bach) and melancholy shots of people waiting or wandering aimlessly evoke the swells and currents of the ocean that divides the two continents.
The porosity of borders is also alluded to in Dissonant Rhythms (2004), a two-screen projection consisting of a series of static shots; a World War I military base outside Antwerp and a series of World War II bunkers nearby. Despite the 30-odd years that divide their construction, it is difficult to
tell them apart. Their concrete surfaces suffer similar scarring, and as the undergrowth begins to absorb them into the forest the details of their histories retreat. While few people today would remember such structures being used, their lumpen presence in forgotten corners across Europe still sits darkly in the continent’s collective consciousness. Cavusoglu describes, like boats on the ocean, the ways we are subject to currents of history beyond our control.
