Talking from a kite was a project of the Edith collective making kites and videos, hosted at Vaisseau Mère’s WAW residency in the old Schlumberger petroleum company facility in Uccle from September to December.
Going in, I thought that the way to best use the time and space offered by this setting was to make a massive, complex flying apparatus, one overwhelming piece consisting of contributions from each member of the group.
As Clara, Nathan, Perle, and Louise worked their way down different material and formal paths, I was hung up on how many weeks I had spent inside accomplishing very little. I was imagining what such a special kite could be, building it up in my head to be something so unknowably intricate yet elegantly reduced that I couldn’t find the first step toward it. Part of this imagined kite’s singularity was that it would not draw on existing designs, returning instead to intuitive fundamentals of aerodynamics and geometry.
This unwillingness to follow precedent came out of early conversations about how to define what we were doing as an artistic project; what would differentiate it from the normal on- and offline culture of kite building. The abundance of functioning kite designs out there felt like solved problems we couldn’t contribute to.
Part of what had pushed us toward this insularity was simple timing. We started at the end of autumn, just as I watched the spring-summer European kite festival season wrapping up at Tempelhof on an old friend’s social media. Without these gatherings, our engagement with the community would effectively be online-only, likely one-sided as we were hesitant to engage without having something clearly novel to give back.
It kept getting colder and one day I decided that the time I was spending indoors thinking about kites must be better spent outside just flying one. We had been talking about testing everything we had been making during a special one-time trip to the Belgian seaside, but it struck me as arrogant to focus so much on form in the meantime while none of us even really knew what flying a kite felt like.
We had done reconnaissance at Parc de Forest to see the Brazilians who fly their fighter kites there every Sunday — a minimal, fast, ultra-lightweight design. The park’s grassy hillside funnels the prevailing wind from the south to create ideal flying conditions free of obstructions.
Traditionally, fighter kites are really meant for aerial combat. They cause a bunch of problems in Brazil and India where they’re particularly popular specifically because of the aspect that gives them their pugilistic potency — the special kite string coated with a powder of crushed glass, used to cut the lines of adversaries.
Terminology varies globally, but at least in India this string is called “Chinese manja”. It’s unclear whether it actually originates from China so I might have to chalk this up to Indian nationalist chauvinism. Apparently in Brazil this glass-covered string is such a widespread problem that motorcyclists will attach poles with razor blades to their bikes to cut stray kite lines before the manja gets them. There are regional bans but it turns out that some of the guys most into kite fighting are scary retired military and crooked cops. In Indian media there are frequent stories about kite festivals killing hundreds of birds in a single day, and the danger of manja is well-enough known that kite youtubers insert visual jokes about gruesome neck and hand injuries in their thumbnails. Meanwhile, a prominent online maker of glass-covered line also feels the need to post about his love of birds in order to get ahead of the story.
The first day back in the workshop after I’d decided I needed to actually get out and fly, I put together a reed wood frame that superficially resembled these Brazilian fighters without really thinking too much about the mechanics behind it. I misinterpreted the simplicity of the shape as ease of replication. Clara made a beautiful sail for my frame out of ugly umbrella fabric and I took the assembled kite outside. I waved it around, conspicuously not making it fly, until the wooden frame snapped simultaneously in three or four spots.
For once it was a sudden and complete failure, a repudiation of my naïve approach up until that point. I left the studio frustrated, and that evening Nathan sent me the youtube channel of Bruce Lambert, a preeminent figure in the somewhat aging hippie/countercultural North American Fighter Kites scene.
There weren’t exactly quick tips to be gleaned from the extremely chilled-out way he explained things, but I patiently watched his trilogy of videos about building a simple fighter kite like his GoodDog design. The most important part is the technique for deriving geometry and proportions starting from nothing but the natural curvature of the bow, the left-right axis in this style of kite.
I stayed up a better part of that night laying out my template on durable grey cardboard and carefully cutting around it to make a sail out of ordinary cellophane. It turned out this basic template worked fine for my fighter kites through to the end of the project. With the goal of making the kite as adjustable as possible until I learned what worked best, I assembled the spine from two lengths of reed jammed into a short curved segment of aluminum tube. Until I could find carbon fibre, I used wire for the bow. There was some surprise that I was suddenly working on this with such focus, especially at home outside of the normal hours we were spending at the residency.
At Parc de Forest the next morning, my kite flew just enough (before the sail ripped) to encourage me to keep going. The cellophane got brittle in the cold, and the careless way I rolled the kite to carry it on my bike made the string rip up the sail. It was time to indulge a bit in Nathan’s taste for more exotic synthetic technicals: tear-resistant lightweight polycro sheeting used under tents, and carbon fibre rods.
I’ve read enough Grant Petersen blahg posts to be pretty sceptical of carbon fibre for any application, whether it be bicycle forks or the imploding OceanGate submersible. I still think its tendency to fail suddenly is fundamentally unnerving, and environmentally it’s an unfortunate replacement for infinitely recyclable aluminum. Nonetheless, Nathan and I tracked down an outdoor activities store in Ixelles that sold the thin-diameter rods we needed.
It wasn’t my scene. The engineering student keeping shop was devoted in his evangelism of kitesurfing — “après, c’est comme si t’as fumé un joint”. What could be better? He didn’t realize they sold the rods we were looking for until we pointed them out in a corner behind the counter.
Nathan and I took our advanced new fighter kites to the park on a drizzly morning — not a Sunday, we weren’t ready for that kind of scrutiny! Mine had a polycro sail, his was made of holographic foil. They lifted off in the steady wind but spun around like crazy. Sure enough, within ten minutes a friendly Brazilian guy walking his dog introduced himself and strongly suggested we add tails to the kites. “With a tail, they go high.”
Nathan scrounged around for fallen leaves, tied them along two pieces of cotton string, and sure enough the kites worked much better. I think the principle is that the shape of the sail causes it to move forward when it catches the wind, and a tail on the stern helps keep the nose pointed up. Eventually the tails and lines got hopelessly tangled for our cold fingers but the fundamentals were now in place. I could imagine how nice it must be to do this in warm weather.
In the following weeks I probably became annoying in my repeated insistence that the other members of the group come to the park with me to try flying. I had assembled an enjoyable setup. The kite was nearly invisible to both the eye and the camera: a polycro sail with packing tape fixtures, a sanded wood spine, and a carbon fibre bow tipped with caps of aerospace-grade PTFE tape. I rewrapped the low-friction polyamide string around a clothesline spool so I could quickly wind and unwind. I had a few different tails, my favourite being a series of green plastic circles Perle had cut out and glued together on the very first day of the project. I would put this all in a drawing tube, ride down to the park, and focus all my attention on the sky as the kite unspooled the string to the end of the line. It was all so lightweight it felt like cheating, and the precision of the kite’s flight made it suitable as an instrument to evaluate the quality of the wind in different parts of the city.
I was finally locked into a cycle of testing and iteration that would carry me through to the conclusion of the project when we took our kites to the sea. My final fighter kites were made of a new old stock electronics store bag that I’d bought some lightbulbs in at the Marolles market. One side carried the blue Helvetica Panasonic logotype, the other the black-and-white slab serif of hifi subbrand Technics. There’s a longtermist marketing lesson in here somewhere — someone decades ago decided to use particularly nice plastic for these bags, and here we are plastering the logos against the sky for free.
My doubts about going to the sea proved unimportant. I told the others I’d grown up far inland from the coast, rendering its significance abstract and generic, a product of watching too many youtube kite videos. But when we got off the train at the end of the line in Oostende it was clear that of course the wind felt different than in smoggy soggy Brussels.
There were now enough working kites to go around, so everyone in the group got to fly at once. As breezy as the fighters were, Nathan’s big new box kite was the most impressive machinery we deployed that day. Just hold it up in the right direction and it would shoot right up out of your hands, pulling on the spool with alarming insistence. But eventually its wooden struts snapped in midair, and it erratically limped down to the ground like a wounded pack animal doing its best to not let on its injury to the wolves.
The fighter kites held up better, suffering no worse than some ripped tape. When a kite crashed into the soft ground of the tidal plane, you could give it a little flick to get it airborne again and simply shake off the wet sand in midair. We mostly avoided tangling lines, and swapped tails around to see what worked best in the heavier wind. Louise eventually just tied the Panasonic kite to her backpack and let it drift serenely at fifty metres for the better part of an hour until the sun started to go down. The gulls flew right by. We shook the sand out of our bags as we caught our breath after running for the last train back.