Calderón & Piñeros (La Decanatura)

Sólheimasandur

Calderón & Piñeros (La Decanatura) refer to Sólheimasandur as a work that tackles the issue of “the ruin as a tourist destination.” As they say, “at the end, tourists become an essential part of this unusual, beautiful, and—at the same time—banal landscape.” The video features a plane wreck on Sólheimasandur beach in Iceland, where a navy plane belonging to the United States Army crashed in 1973 due to fuel exhaustion. The plane appears as an anthropomorphized figure: lying on the sands of the beach without its wings, it resembles a sculptural torso that has lost all its limbs, with cables coming out of its body appearing as internal organs. These injuries remind the viewer of the danger inherent in these artifacts, and the potential for both heroism and death implicit in flying them to far-away territories.

Following several shots of the plane sitting in the fog alone, humans slowly start to appear in the scenery. The appearance of a man on a Segway touring around on the black sand—which resembles the texture of the moon—is followed by shots of tourists taking endless selfies in front of the plane. With the fog surrounding the scene and the unsettling soundtrack, an uncanny feeling builds, turning these individuals into subjects waiting for their unknown future—possibly in a far-away galaxy. These individuals’ bodies become an echo of the broken torso that belongs to the helpless plane lying on the black sand. In this atmosphere, it’s hard to know whether these individuals are aware of the fact that they are being recorded, and whether the actions are real-life encounters or staged events—an underlying characteristic prevalent in the collective’s artistic practice.