Kathrin Meyer. Laura Toots: No place / Like Home. - Acts of Refusal. Fleeing, Dreaming, Repeating, Observing (Among Others). Exhibition catalogue. Editors: Ellen Blumenstein / Kathrin Meyer. Tartu Art House, Tartu, 2011

In her photographs and videos, Laura Toots (*1986 in Tallinn, lives in Tallinn) uses references from everyday life, often from her own family background, and translates them into images (mostly videos or photographs), which connect ideas about one’s position in life and family to questions concerning contemporary society. The common and usual becomes a symbolic space, where ideas about family, belonging and home can be contested and reinvented.

For the exhibition Acts of Refusal, Toots presents her new video Turnaround which plays with dreams and ideas related to flying, such as going away, starting from zero, leaving old things behind, discovering a new and better world and a better life somewhere out there. The airplane’s pre-take off ignition is a technical procedure that passengers never witness in all its details. For them, it is just the moment before the adventure of flying begins. The flight attendants start the video about onboard security and how to behave in case of emergency at the same time one might be trying to forget that the act of lifting the plane’s body into the air is a technical procedure whose failure is deadly. Starting up is being witnessed – if at all – from the outside.

Toots’ camera observes the details that are needed to prepare for flight. It moves slowly, registers details and actions, creating an intense atmosphere full of tension and suspense. The plane, the machine itself is the protagonist of the work. The human side is left out, the focus lies on the procedure, the sounds, the texture of the machines, the buttons that are pushed. The moment before lifting off is celebrated, staged like a ritual, like a series of sacred actions. As expectation rises, the scene seems to become the dramatic prelude to a magnificent journey. After having switched on everything, setting the engine in motion and preparing the machine for a journey into the uncertain, everything falls back to zero.

Toots uses this moment of tension as an image for a desire to flee and the expectation of leaving one’s own world behind to find something better, brighter, perhaps more exciting. The work raises the question of what the idea of leaving embodies, and what kinds of dreams are being nurtured in the twilight of our imaginations to start a new episode of life in a different place, with different people, as a different person. What is the place we might leave? How does the place we long for look like? What will be different? What would it be like to break away? What happens if we stay? Is change ever possible or will it all stay the same?