Flying Tigers

Close the windows. The tiger is coming. I can smell it! Alzheimer’s disease triggers a fragment of memory to surface in an old woman’s mind, witnessed by the daughter, Indian filmmaker Madhusree Dutta. She follows this trail, left by her mother, back to the times of WWII. In the northeastern state of Assam, in 1942 the US Army had implemented the first airbridge across the Himalaya, to send military aid to Kunming in China, carried out by the special airforce unit Flying Tiger. The building of an enormous infrastructure destroyed the ecological balance of the jungles, and real tigers appeared in the tea plantations of Assam, where the director’s mother was growing up. In the course of this research, Madhusree and her friend, Chinese media scholar You Mi, whose friendship could only develop in a third country like Germany, discover a common moment of history between two countries with closed borders. They are joined by the young Assamese writer Purav Goswami, driven into the research by his interest in landscape, soil and terrain. In a growing audiovisual web of personal anecdotes, letters and messages, they embark on a journey between times and territories, between fragile memories of pasts unknown, and invisible corners of the present. Like chars in the powerful river Brahmaputra, floating islands of narratives appear and disappear throughout the film, fertile but not fixable as political or dramaturgical territories. In this, the filmmaker makes us see the world through a different lens, like Alzheimer’s. The autobiographical turns hybrid, maybe even hallucinatory. (pong film)

“Global logistics, supply chains and commodity flows are the themes our current exhibition, INDUSTRIAL: Silk Roads 3000, focuses on. The starting point is the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ or ‘New Silk Road’, an intercontinental infrastructure project that China has been expanding worldwide since 2013. Even though there are fundamental differences between – to use Michel de Certeau’s terms – ‘tactical’ airlifts and ‘strategic’ Silk Roads, the following applies to both: Goods – in the case of the Flying Tigers, weapons and fuel; on the Silk Roads, consumer goods and raw materials – cross borders almost effortlessly, whilst for people on either side of the borders between China, India and Myanmar, this is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible.” (Inke Arns)