Holding Pattern

Holding Pattern is a manoeuvre used in aviation designed to delay an aircraft already in flight while keeping it within a specified airspace. The procedure involves oval flights performed by planes, waiting for new information regarding the landing availability. Between 2017 and 2019, I repeatedly circumnavigated the Ghimbav-Brasov Airport along the barbed wire fence to photograph the construction of the Airport, the landscape and the leftovers. As the Airport underwent several challenges to its opening, it became a local fixture of inactivity and unfulfilled progress. The pieces of infrastructure that I have photographed, some in decay and some in disrepair, became emblems of mediation on place, industry, economy and the promises of a change of ideological format to be completed. The images gravitate around the runway and depict a portrait of a landscape embedded with a strong, palpable sense of waiting.

After completing the runway in 2014 and several years of stagnation, the first Airport to be built in post-communist Romania announced its opening in the summer of 2023.