Open Suitcase – Casper Braat

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Departures Series (2023)

Airports around the world utilize similar aesthetics that ensure a safe and efficient experience for the traveler. Air travel has become a homogenized experience shaped by an industry that aims to create a feeling of luxury for the lowest cost. With Departures, Casper Braat recreates this timeless place that is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. In his installation, the visitor is a passenger waiting in limbo, who can help themselves to everyday conveniences sculpted from Carrara marble.

Schiphol, Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle, Malpensa, Adolfo Suárez, Tegel. Over a 10-day period, Casper Braat waited in the passenger terminals of these airports, which can be regarded as symbols of our globalized culture. As an in-between location rather than a destination, the airport terminal is an environment where passengers from anywhere in the world temporarily coexist. A utopian vision of safety and togetherness meets a dystopian reality of control and depersonalization. This insulated universe is reality until boarding begins. While waiting, time flattens, and there is no sense of the present.

Open Suitcase
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Carrara Marble White
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46x56x47cm
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2023