TRANSIT

“Central Airport THF” is a documentary film about the temporary housing of refugees in the halls of the former Tempelhof Airport, located at the edge of Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld. As if by accident, the director contrasts the arrested life in the adapted shelter to the mobility of life in the politically contested Tempelhof Park adjacent to it. Beginning with the specific locality of Central Airport Tempelhof, its architecture, history, and current use as refugee housing, the film employs aesthetic means to render an affectively knowable violence that extends to the very ground of what we call ‘infrastructure.’ The analysis of these aesthetic moments leads to questions that are only rarely addressed in the context of displacement and asylum, but are no less central to the relationship between displacement and mobility: What is common possession? Who owns the world? Does the world fall—can it even fall—under the categories of property or ownership?