Heavenly Kingdom

This is a book with photographs by Christine Hansen from airports in Norway, Germany, and the US, an essay entitled “Close to Heaven” by philosopher Cato Wittusen, and a preface written by Per Kvist, dean at Bergen Academy of Art and Design.

In her pictures of landscapes, we are presented with various topographical segments of airport areas. She confronts us with a cluster of airports’ marginal zones and outskirts, from airports located in New York, Miami, Las Vegas, Mojave in California, Bergen, and Florø. In focusing on airports as marginal spaces, they might be intended to appear as non-places, in the sense of being places that we, as travelers, are not particularly familiar with. A seminal feature of the pictures is their subversion of the traveler’s perspective. In this terra nullius, we are all outsiders. In this no man’s land, buildings and aircrafts are reduced to minor figures, just big enough to keep the illusion of the Utopian alive.

Cato Wittusen, “Close to Heaven”