‘Arrivals’ is a site specific installation, created by Marco De Mutiis, as the result of his residency in Videotage. During the fuse:: artist-in-residence program, the artist developed an interest in the symptomatic disappearance of the neighboring Kai Tak old airport site. Kai Tak was home to Hong Kong International Airport until 1997, when the current Chek Lap Kok Airport took its place. The old site of Kai Tak airport is now being converted in a new site accommodating a new residential area, a cruise terminal and a subway station.

In a convulsive tranquility a re-engineered system of split flap mechanisms questions our perception of trace, memory and time. Wittingly zigzagging between the incumbency of text and sound, ‘Arrivals’ attempts to recreate a fragmented universe of personal memories, documents and archival records of Kai Tak, looking for bits and pieces of an identity that has been conveniently left unaddressed or simply turned into a legend of the distant past.  It is a memory that is being denied to be accounted for, in a desire to turn the spotlight on the new achievements of the metropolis in the international arena, such as the new airport in Chek Lap Kok and the current development of the Kai Tak site.

The kinetic split flap modules, scattered around Videotage’s space, frantically turn, revealing letters, making words and sentences, creating and destroying meanings. These are fragments of text in constant mutation, where a custom made computer program looks through a database of data from archival documents, images and footage, as well as text taken from interviews made on the streets of ToKwaWan and Kowloon City. Through this process the cold archival data interweaves with the `imperfect memories, creating a hybrid and dynamic text based representation, which lies between a past that is being distanced and a past that is being remembered.

Flight codes, remnant memories of local shop owners going to the rooftops to try to ‘touch the planes’, destinations, resonances of airplanes passing by, airport’s gates and delay notices, this is the diorama of a collective memory that does not stop in front of the disarming confrontation with time. Time here is rendered visible and tangible at the same. It is in fact through the usage of time as a metronome of meaning that the installation sonically creates an immersive environment that triggers through the audio medium the memories of old airports.