ABOUT

In many of his projects, Markus Krottendorfer is interested in the foundations of our modernity and present, in the traces of fiction and mythology, and in the conflicts between rationality and irrational desire, which may still be virulent at the core of our societies. He repeatedly finds special places where traces of strange and contradictory worldviews can be found, or places where questions about their effectiveness or their utopian potential can be asked.

In this book, the disused Ellinikon Airport in Athens becomes the setting for his photographic and performative exploration of the (architectural) remnants of ideologies that shaped society until the 1960s: technical development, progress, growing prosperity, which also found expression in the increasing conquest of the world through travel. Airports became the embodiment of this ‘progress,’ at the same time spaces of new social formations, and finally ‘non-places,’ as Marc Augé called them. Through complex lighting, filters, and the partial use of smoke, Krottendorfer transforms the airport spaces into an ‘illusionistic, theatrical psychedelia,’ as Christian Egger writes in his text contribution.