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Loneliness is mostly narrative It also has an aesthetic: an empty tableau in which the lonely act is performed In Naeem Mohaiemen’s Tripoli Cancelled (2017), a man roams the large expanse of a disused airport – Athens’s Ellinikon, designed by Eero Saarinen in the 1960s It is unclear whether he is trapped there by circumstance, or of his own volition; we never once see him trying to leave This narrative of loneliness is played out with great precision The protagonist lifts bags off an abandoned luggage belt and places them in a careful pile on the floor before folding himself into a foetal position on the conveyor Later, he carefully hangs his blazer onto the jagged frame of an idle helicopter, before stepping into the pilot’s seat In one of the last scenes in the film, he gently dislodges the top halves of flight crew mannequins before carrying them onto an empty plane, placing them into seats Very carefully, he pulls apart the buttons of an air stewardess’s blouse, before cupping a single, plastic breast   The last aircraft to take off from Ellinikon was an Olympic Airways flight to Thessaloníki in 2001 Our protagonist stares up at the announcement of this flight’s departure, and as the camera reels upward – there are only ruined cables, and metal debris In Humiliation, Wayne Koestenbaum writes, ‘To study a subject is to humiliate the subject, and to humiliate oneself by the process of studying it’ The humiliations in Tripoli Cancelled exist in entangled layers In the slow unravelling of the protagonist’s masculinity, and in the humiliation of the airport itself, and what it represents: a grandstanding modernism, and a paean to globalisation   Bani Abidi’s film The Distance From Here (2010) opens with a close-up of an arrangement of objects upon tarmac – a clunky typewriter, a pair of orange and white umbrellas, two irregular tables propped against each other, an empty chair As the camera widens, we see a large, empty maidan, with a narrow wooden doorway acting as the point of entry Abidi seems to reference similar grounds in South Asia, where crowds