And live the space of a door
Aisling McCoy
Since its inception by the Nazi Ministry of Aviation in 1936 to its role in the Berlin Airlift and its current use as a public park, the former Tempelhof airport has been the backdrop to many key events in Berlin’s history. Throughout this history the buildings symbolism has constantly shifted to reflect changing political and social ideologies. Following the refugee crisis of 2015, the Tempelhof was used as an emergency shelter, a role which echoes its use by returning german refugees following WWII. These images reflect on the situation of contemporary refugees within this historical and architectural context, as they wait in the hangars of the Tempelhof, for their asylum applications to be processed.
The use of the Tempelhof as a shelter provokes the impossible question; how could one inhabit an airport? A space designed to relate to the crowd rather than to the individual, to channel movement rather than allow a space to dwell. The parallel between the political place-less-ness of the refugee and the non-place of the empty terminal means that the Tempelhof becomes a metaphor for the condition of permanent transience that many refugees face.
This series is a meditation on this non-place, both physical and psychological- somewhere between past and future, acceptance and refusal, arrival and departure.
This project was made with the support of the Belfast Exposed Futures Programme, the Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Project Award and the Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Award
Aisling McCoy is an Irish visual artist whose work looks at how we inhabit space. Her background as an architect is central to her practice, which investigates the conflict between architecture as an intellectual concept, created through images, and its translation into built form. She’s particularly interested in the ideological aspect of inhabitation and the role of both architecture and photography in constructing the ideal.
A graduate of the MFA Photography programme at the Belfast School of Art, Aisling’s work has been exhibited internationally. She is the recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Award, TBG+S Project Studio Award, Belfast Exposed Futures and Institut Français Cité Internationale des Arts residency award. She has been a selected artist at PhotoIreland New Irish Works and Circulations Festival de la Jeune Photographie, has been shortlisted for the Kassel Photobook Festival Dummy Award and nominated for the Prix Pictet.
The Radiant City
The starting point for this series was the paradox of utopia, good-place but also no-place, the utopia is an ideal construction of the mind which can't be separated from the real place that inspires it. I'm interested in how our projections of utopia influence our experience of place, allowing us to give meaning to the world, by believing it differently. The series explores these ideas around utopia through one of the icons of modernism -Le Corbusiers Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. Designed in 1952 as the “Radiant City”, the building was conceived as a prototype housing solution for the city of the future. These photographs were made at the Unité over 60 years later, in 2014, and address the overlap between place making and image making, and the role of both architecture and photography in constructing the ideal.