all aboard, October 8 - November 16, 2025, Athens international airport, Athens, Greece.
Susan Daboll, Nothing to declare ? ( 2025) three-channel video installation, [3’43”, 1’48”, 3’32”], chairs, sign, table, plastic toy suitcases, backpacks, suitcases, dimensions variable / video editing: Alexandros Mavrogiannis.
Nothing to declare ? (2025) by Susan Daboll excavates layers of perception sedimenting beneath the epidermis of cognition. In her installation, she delineates a liminal architecture of psychic movement, where affect, memory and repetition materialise as ungovernable undercurrents. The airplane windows transform into a retinal mnemonic aperture, a somatic filter onto an atmospheric register allowing internal fragmentation to be staged against the abstraction of the sky. In her three-channel video, the horizon is perpetually receding, hovering, dislocated. the work orchestrates an iteration of distillation. Accumulation (whether it is material, cognitive or emotional) is heavily processed. Knowledge, experience and objecthood turn into an afterimage. What remains is the trace, the irreducible fragment, the real that resists symbolisation. The indication of the sign “nothing to declare ?” resonates as a superegoic demand that interrogates the subject’s complicity with systems of control, border and visibility. Yet, it is deeply personal and self-referential, laying bare feelings and hidden fears. What is one willing to renounce without external coersion? What psychic economies are embedded in the act of declaration, or refusal? Daboll composes a matrix of deferral, a space where visual and existential clarity is mysteriously suspended. In a landscape saturated by over-articulated selves, this work privileges opacity as ethics. The viewer is prompted to remain within the ambiguity of unclaimed territory. Tens of transparent miniature suitcases confront our understanding of declaration. In this drifting domain, where certainty is prolonged, Daboll’s installation calls upon us to contemplate the paradox of presence and absence, where what is left unsaid becomes a deeper truth and, in the silence, the self both emerges and vanishes.