Welcome Back to Earth, Kunsthalle St. Gallen, May 2003.

After two years in planning, and two cancellations, this show finally came together in a really relaxed and spontaneous way, wrapping up my work on the theme of aviation, starting with the blastoff of First Woman on the Moon four years earlier, and announcing my homecoming of sorts.

But the show was first and foremost meant to serve as a promotional exhibit for the plan to bring Plane Landing to the Alps, to inform people locally about this event and the ideas that surround it. The main piece is the technical drawing of the plane, a 9 x 3 m plot, produced by Cameron Balloons in Bristol, depicting a step in the creation of the of the actual object.

The long blue piece is the first displayed version of the Aviation Library, made up of 101 books with skies and airplanes on them, on any subject and arranged in gradation from dark blue to turquoise and purple. The curator, Gianni Jetzer, and I were shopping for second-hand books all around Zurich for a month, so most are in German and there are many funny juxtapositions: a blue Bible next to a manual from the now defunct Swissair, for example. I made a new set of clocks from the Timezone series especially for Switzerland, the bird is on loan from the local natural history museum and the unattended arrival desk is the Kunsthalle’s own.


See Plane Landing.
See Aviation Archive.
See Timezone.
See Top Secret.
See First Woman on the Moon.