Both Statues Have Wings (2012)
hi-definition video, 3:20 mins

This work was initially created as part of TEGEL - Flights of Fancy, an artist film project to commemorarate the planned closure of Tegel Airport, Berlin in 2012. A litany of building errors and outright incompetence meant that it’s replacement - Berlin Brandenburg Airport - was not ready on time and was eight years late when it opened in 2020. As a result, we got to celebrate Tegel's passing twice - once in 2012 at Berlin Babylon Cinema and then again, eight years later, online as a Twitch streamed performance. The following text was published to accompany the initial presentation of the work.

"There are two statues of Otto Lilienthal in Berlin. One in Steglitz, and the other at Tegel Airport. Tegel’s official title is Tegel Otto Lilienthal Airport — although the name is seldom used in everyday speech, and warrants speech marks and brackets when mentioned online. The re-naming of Tegel as the Otto Lilienthal Airport occurred in 1988, just one year before the event that would eventually lead to the airport itself becoming redundant.

The statue at Tegel is situated near the viewing deck and lies prone among the debris and cigarette ends from the nearby bar. Lilienthal is depicted with wings spread across the ground and laid out as though having come to earth, Icarus-like, from a failed attempt at flight, his wrists bound together. In this way it is quite unlike Peter Breuer’s 1914 Lilienthal Memorial in Steglitz, which stands erect atop a high plinth as though preparing to take flight. Created under two entirely different social contexts, they seem to present us with two entirely different Lilienthals."

Subsequent to the opening of the Berlin Brandenburg Airport the statue of Lillienthal from Tegel was relocated to a glass vitrine above the airport railway station. It is now used as a place to throw coins.