Airport Projects

This monograph publication surveys Cibic’s Airport Projects, a body of work developed through a series of performative interventions, installations, and spatial actions situated within airports and other transitional environments. Bringing together documentation, critical texts, and visual material, the book traces the evolution of Cibic’s early investigation into the relationship between space, experience, and the production of meaning within systems of mobility.

Positioned within what Marc Augé terms “non-places,” airports emerge as spaces of controlled anonymity—sites where identity is temporarily suspended and governed by rigid systems of authority. Cibic enters these environments to examine how experience is constructed, mediated, and consumed, staging interventions that disrupt the apparent neutrality of these spaces. Through subtle manipulations of existing infrastructures—from departure boards to waiting lounges—she exposes the mechanisms through which desire, expectation, and collective narratives are produced.

The projects presented in the publication—ranging from Dictionary of Imaginary Places to Tourists Welcome—operate at the intersection of fiction and reality, inserting fabricated narratives into authoritative systems of information. These gestures reveal how travel itself has become a commodified and aestheticised experience, dependent less on physical movement than on the circulation of images, symbols, and myths.

Extending beyond documentation, the monograph frames Airport Projects as a critical inquiry into the ideological dimensions of contemporary mobility, bringing into the foreground the question of myth fabrication within systems of authority. By intervening in and reconfiguring their elements, Cibic opens them to reinterpretation and exposes their dependence on constructed political narratives.