window international

WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY

Window International is a shared migratory format.

The earth shifting and disheartening view through the airplane window. The [somewhat] clean slate.

For the past 20+ years I have been living in Queens, New York. During that time, I have come to understand Queens as an extension of JFK airport terminals, a place of permanent Völkerwanderung. The other worldly ”Terminal City” as planned by the civic developers, urbanists, and architects of the 50s, 60s and the 70s as the vision of global future has all but disappeared by the time I first arrived in 1992. The visionary international terminals of Queens Airports are now probed by omnipresent security, advertisement plastered, nondescript, provisional constructions, and air travel has become a process to be endured and feared. Queens is the spreading city of Terminal City.

There, the city space is the airport non-place, social configurations change as fast as boarding gate numbers, and foreigners are the natives. Nowhere else in the world have I experienced so much traffic, so much draft, and so much future as in Queens. As you look up, there are always a few airplanes overhead, their tiny windows raining pins of uncertainty and broadcasting conundrums. I have come into contact with migration every day, every week, every month of living in Queens. I have heard countless disappointments, plans, expectations, and projections. Almost everyone is there temporary, exiled from somewhere dreadful and irreparable, arriving or transiting somewhere better or returning home after all. Sometimes it takes a lifetime. It becomes a lifetime.

Feel free to add a vision or pull the shade.

WINDOW INTERNATIONAL

Offset print on paper

Format: 69.8 x 49.8 cm // 27.48" x 19.61"

Initial edition: 500