Women on Aeroplanes by Annett Busch

Women on Aeroplanes—agency for flying ideas is an artistic research project, based on a framework and network that is necessarily constantly evolving and changing. it aims to gain a broader understanding of what independence and interdependence means. Looking closely at the long history of transatlantic networks and the struggles for liberation, predating the process of independence on the African continent (and elsewhere), the project explores how women were always central to such networks and struggles, in which they played multiple roles. Their stories are however hardly told and their faces remain widely invisible. We aim to not only frame their various and heterogeneous contributions, politically and artistically, but also create new parameters and premises of narratives. To recall the notion of independence today necessarily means to address the gap between formal independence and a process of decolonisation that was simultaneously national and intranational, transnational and international and which remains, in many ways, incomplete. The project's title is borrowed loosely from Kojo Laing's critically acclaimed second novel Woman of the Aeroplanes, written in 1988. With its deconstructive syntax and implosion of genres, the novel sets the tone for a historical narrative, in which subordinate subject-object relations are negated. Laing’s method of speculative fiction writing can be seen as a making-of-theory using other means. As a reference point, it opens a pathway to a new grammar that makes re-visiting and re-writing history possible.

The idea of making use of spaces, transforming existing ones, creating new ones, making a living and a change, very much carries through the pages of Inflight Magazine #4. The importance to find, maintain and organise places, frameworks, and opportunities that allow for a continuity to negotiate, dispute, struggle over common grounds. Making spaces vibratory. With stopover conversations in Warsaw and London, thinking of the wonderful Bisi Silva who passed away while assembling this issue.

# 4 Stopover

Contributions by Theresa Kampmeier, Bisi Silva, Temitayo Ogunbiyi, Odun Orimolade, Marika Sherwood, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, Garnette Cadogan, Lubaina Himid, Elvira Dyangani Ose.

Edited by Annett Busch, Marie-Hélène Gutberlet & Michael C. Vazquez

Proofreading & Transcripts by Prerna Bishnoi

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