Überflieger (2010)
In 1987, the West German teenager, Mathias Rust, flew his one-engine Cessna aircraft out of Helsinki and into Soviet air space, landing eventually, in Moscow’s Red Square. “I wanted to build an imaginary bridge between East and West”, he said later, in explanation of his actions. Rust would spend over a year in a Soviet labor camp, but his literal flight of imagination led to the firing of two of Gorbachev’s main opponents of his Perestroika reforms, the Defense Minister, and Air General, and it could well be argued that this made a significant contribution to the end of the Cold War, culminating as it did not long after, in the fall of the Berlin Wall, and collapse of the Soviet Union.
Rust’s flight is celebrated in a homage performance, Überflieger, by the dance artist Katja Dreyer.
“The piece aestheticizes the political work which the image of his flight performed, detailing as it does, also, the artist’s attempt to make contact with Rust and involve him in the performance; an invitation he declined. The piece conveys the disconnection between spaces in which images of flight circulate, in art, in politics, in the psyche, and in the air, while nevertheless expressing the fundamentality of connections between these spaces. It matters little that Rust does not appear in conversation within the piece, or maybe it matters more that he does not. The strongest of solidarities between spaces is often not only imagined but silent.”
— Julien Reid , A Political Genealogy of Dance: The Choreographing of Life and Images
