Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Pandemic Landscapes. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Pandemic Landscapes. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Pandemic Landscapes. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
Pandemic Skies. Observations from London Heathrow
Abstract
In this photo essay I present on the experience of Heathrow Airport under the conditions of the first national lockdown in England, March – June 2020. I bring together images of Heathrow, planetary social thought, and aesthetic reflections on the modern ruin. The essay relays how the airport, ordinarily a space of weakened phenomenological experience of the past, reverted during the pandemic to one in which history was acutely felt. For as the excesses of the present moment receded, so did their capacity to distract. Into view came an urban fabric tailored to needs that were no longer. But as well as a vanishing past, the scene was unavoidably also a catastrophic future. For in the context of growing awareness of climate change and the pervasive anxiety that characterises our time, the landscape was also allegorical, offering pause for thought on the dystopia of the present and the need to act. To this extent, even if the airport’s services were to recover, the cultural reception of its promise may be irredeemably altered.
Keywords: art and ecology; art and globalization; Heathrow airport; pandemic; ruin
“I thought the Museum of Civilization was a rumour,” August said.
“What is it?” Kirsten had never heard of it.
“I heard it was a museum someone set up in an airport.”
Emily St. John Mandel. Station Eleven. Picador, 2015. p124.
I.
London, May 2020, six weeks into the first COVID-19 lockdown. About halfway along the northern edge of the Perimeter Fence of Heathrow Airport, there is a lone Ford Mustang in Business Parking (Fig1). To see it, I have left home legitimately for exercise, but more truthfully to witness first-hand the remarkable pause that the pandemic has forced on the global aviation system.
The Mustang has been here for several weeks. It is likely to belong to a male (I’ve checked the demographic), a businessman who travelled abroad as the pandemic struck and is now unable to retrieve it. Perhaps he is Pierre Dupont, the protagonist in Marc Augé’s seminal anthropological text non-Places (1995). Dupont is a French businessman whose very average journey to work takes him through places devoid of identity, history or social relations. Augé tells us he travelled to the airport along the autoroute, paid my means of a machine, parked in Row J and, aboard the plane, immersed himself in the inflight magazine. So all pervasive, so utterly absorbing is the present for Dupont, that there is no sense of what has gone before or of what is to follow. An ever expanding and endless stream of technology, entertainment, advertisements, all of which necessitate choices, decisions, and arbitrations on the now – displaces all other temporal experience. Dupont’s lifestyle is one of total presentness and the epitome of supermodernity. The international airport is his native environment.
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Pandemic Landscapes. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
The New Zealander. 1872. The last of Gustave Doré’s plates for London. A Pilgrimage.
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Pandemic Landscapes. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
A huge amount has happened since the Mustang was left in row J. Human populations have shut themselves away. In fear of their lives, or unable to stay put, many have organised themselves into the respective nationalities and returned home. Factories have halted production, leisure centres and museums shut their doors. The state feels more important, the environment more dangerous, international borders less permeable. Though the pandemic has brought for some of us a sense of respite, for others it has brought anxiety and/or amplified the struggles and strains of our labour as we clamour to move online.[i] In the US there have been riots sparked by the killing of an African American George Floyd but underwritten by growing recognition of the systemic nature of colonial violence, as evidenced by disproportionately high mortality rates of black and minority ethnic COVID-19 victims. At Heathrow the resident airline, British Airways, is fighting for survival. There is news of restructuring and mass redundancies. By the summer of 2021 the media will report that air traffic is down 90%. John Holland Kaye, CEO of the airport authority, will announce that the pandemic could create ghost towns in the surrounding neighbourhoods. The authority, owned by Spanish conglomerate Ferrovial will have shelved its airport expansion plans.
Dupont is caught in the fallout. Augé tells us that on his outbound flight “[f]or a few hours (the time it would take to fly over the Mediterranean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal), he would be alone at last”. Now he can neither board a plane, nor relax. He is also more alone than Augé could ever have imagined. Today he is sitting out ‘le confinement’ in a hotel room, or self-isolating with COVID, or both. Assuming he is not hospitalised, and even if he is, Dupont will be resuming his work on Microsoft Teams. Meanwhile around his car the painted rows that once served to communicate the apportionment of concrete are no longer quite legible in those terms. At the edge groundsel has forced its way between the kerb stones reminding us just how quickly nature can take over. In plain in view of the CCTV I have on occasion lingered to take in the view, but nobody has come to find out what I are doing. There is nobody to come.
In the assessment of the view, there is also a longer timeframe to consider. Since Dupont first boarded a plane, a new and sinister dimension of air travel has come into focus. The Anthropocene thesis – the idea that humans have brought the earth into a new geological era – and the spectre of environmental catastrophe at the hands of ‘fossil capitalism’ (Malm 2015), to which aviation is an integral part, has exposed a profound violence at large in his aero mobile way of life. I will go on to argue this history radically contingent with the coming of the pandemic.
Art has historically engaged with evidence through the in-person presence of the artist and by making this public via documentation and exhibition. To the study of landscape, it brings the sensory, visible, participatory, environmental and material. The political dimension of this modus operandi has been sharpened by the architectural collective Forensic Architecture whose work on state violence, widely exhibited in spaces reserved for art, has been instrumental in showing how first-hand experiences make visible the colonisation and exploitation that is all around us. As Philosophers Etienne Turpin and Heather Davis have shown, Forensic Architecture’s work also speaks to discourses of the Anthropocene.[ii] My practices responds to this tradition and, through my peripatetic experiences of the airport, I propose to bring art history and art methodologies to political geographies of the pandemic landscape. But on this occasion, prompted by the phenomenon of the pause, to the conjunction of experience and environmental politics I bring another of art’s technologies of discernment, namely the logic of subtraction.
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Pandemic Landscapes. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
Simon van de Passe. Frontispiece to Francis Bacon, ‘Instauratio Magna’, (London, J.Bill, 1620). British Museum.
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Pandemic Landscapes. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
Dupont is not the only figure caught up in the airport. In her 1997 photo essay In the Place of the Public: Observations of a Frequent Flyer artist and theorist Martha Rosler documented the departure lounges, walkways and aircraft interior that are integral to a career made possible by flight. She notes: “By the end of the 1970s… the art world required a lot of jetting about by artists for shows, and lectures. As an artist whose fare was paid for by various institutions, I all but abandoned the buses for airplanes’ (91). Rosler not unlike Auge, is interested in the effacement of a certain kind of experience of travel and its substation with totalised industrial representation, a phenomenon which she traces, via Henri Lefebvre, to late capitalism.
By the turn of the Millennium the lifestyle Rosler describes for upwardly mobile US based artists had become familiar, native even, to a generation of European artists. The Scottish painter Carol Rhodes captured the transition in her landscapes of airports seen from aircraft. Marked by human activity yet devoid of people, Rhodes’s airports look hauntingly prescient today (Fig). My own experience as a freshly milled art graduate pinpoints the date of my aeromobility turn with some precision. In 1999 I undertook a residency at Wyspa Gallery, Gdansk, Poland, travelling 27 hours from London by bus. In 2001 I flew a similar distance to the Venice Biennale in 2 hours. The first journey cost me around £80. The second £7 each way, around the price of a McDonald’s meal. In 2003 I took advantage of a new service of direct flights from London Gdansk to attend an exhibition and party at the Shipyard Gallery. I was benefiting from a constellation of conditions that included deregulation of the airline industry – notably the prohibition on point-to-point flights, cheap fuel that flooded the market following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and low interest rates in the financial markets widely available borrowing. By 2020 attendance at the burgeoning circuit of Biennials and residencies is routine, indeed, expected, for a professional for whom knowledge of the field and a community of practice is a prerequisite for contributions in the field. We may not go business class, but we fly regularly.
I put forward this history as a reminder of the extent to which the artist is as involved as everyone else in air travel. My objective is to engage with the airport in lockdown through the protagonism of the artist as a user and beneficiary, displacing the more familiar epistemology of observer from the sidelines. As Rosler showed us, albeit with a different set of reference points, the importance of the distinction for critical thought is paramount. In the context of the Anthropocene, it adds complexity to a condition already fraught with privileges and contradictions. It is no longer sufficient to talk about capitalism, colonialism the Global North in the third person as if it had nothing to do with us. To be reflexively embroiled in the task of problematizing these relations requires the acknowledgement that we are ourselves central to the narrative. We must embrace its uncertainties with significantly raised stakes in the politics of this fact.
From the footbridge at Hatton Cross interchange there opens to the north a view of parked up planes. These and other aircraft visible from other vantage points constitute a large part of the British Airways fleet that has been brought here for storage. Some form a line about a kilometre in length and cutting between a row of maintenance hangars and the perimeter fence. But so tight is the parking regime that it could be broken up only by removing each plane in the reverse order to that in which it was inserted. Buried about halfway along is a Boeing 747 that announces its sponsorship of British athletes bound for the Olympic Games, Tokyo 2020. Nearby another boasts One World. As well as limitations on space, the stowage arrangements reveal insufficient reserves of equipment. To prevent birds nesting in the engines, the cowlings have been wrapped at either end with polythene sheeting. The famous Rolls Royce badges jostle semiotically with strips of gaffer tape holding everything together.
The logistical headache the pandemic has presented the airline tells us just how finely tuned the whole system is. But it also gives a novel indication of scale. Ordinarily distributed through airspace and airports around the globe, most of the fleet is permanently out of sight. There have been a few times when aircraft fleets have been grounded on mass, but none have been global: the events of 9/11, 2001, closed North American airspace for 2 days with a long-term knock-on effect on passenger demand; the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2014 closed European airspace grounding 100,000 flights. The pandemic is the first occasion in the history of aviation when entire fleets from all corners of the globe have been grounded. Accordingly, it has also occasioned for the first time the opportunity to see just how big the fleet is. This revelation is not without paradox: the imperatives of lockdown ensure that only exercising residents and maintenance staff can see them. Nevertheless, even if for only a few, knowledge that normally takes the form of numbers – fleet numbers, journey numbers, passenger numbers, carbon emission numbers – translate into something more graspable and thereby more public, namely the physical experience of a fleet’s volume scaled in relation to a human looking on.
The ability to keep an operation perpetually out of view is highly advantageous when the scale of that operation, were it known, might be cause for concern. It enables it to exist and even expand without raising eyebrows and prompting awkward questions. It helps guarantee the status quo, threatening to stifle both analytical thought (what will be) and normative thought (what should be). However, if the operation comes into view, this advantage is taken away. To this extent the grounding of planes has political promise. By making the sheer number of planes visible, it redistributes power away from the airlines and to those who wish to witness the prospect. In my case, I am given a feel for how many people will normally be flying at any one time. This bigger picture feeds speculation on how my way of life might be impacting on the environment. It thus positions me to make more informed judgements on whether, how often, or how far to fly. For rival transport operators, it will no doubt underscore how the airline benefits from space not available to themselves, the sky, and for the use of which it does not need to pay. For all of us, it gives a sense of how the industry has crept up on us. The grounding of planes brings more than aircraft down to earth.
If the figure of the abandoned Mustang provides a bookend for presentness, then that of the aircraft in storage suggests a longer timeframe within which to position the crisis. Indeed, as a representation of the global, it constitutes a truly spectacular inversion. We could think of it as the negation of Simon Van de Passe’s famous frontispiece to Francis Bacon’s Instauratio Magna (The Great Restoration) (1620). Van de Pass depicts a ship leaving port along with a Latin inscription that says: “Many will travel and knowledge will be increased”. The ship is that of the scientifically minded European heading off round the world discovering, extracting, and collecting. For Bacon this process was, as his title indicates, one of returning the world’s knowledge to a former state of unification, and whose loss is represented in the allegory of Babel. Though the stages by which Bacon’s thought has developed are long and complex, there is an extent to which today’s international system – the processes of collaboration and exchange, the relations of power, the dependence on the boundless resourcefulness of the earth – is a legacy of his engagement with Babel. Thus, the engraving brings the implications of the pandemic into view. For the lines of grounded aircraft tell us that, for the time being, Bacon’s ship has headed back to port.
It will already be clear that for the figure of the artist the inability to travel has significant ramifications. However, the social dimension of this can be grasped more fully when historicised. In Europe the professional artist has been inseparably bound with mobility since at least the 16thcentury. In the centuries of European expedition and conquest the artist’s importance was sealed aboard ships such as the one depicted by van de Passe where there was a need for illustrators, botanists and zoologists, or constructors of the expedition narrative. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a notion of centre and periphery, the former variously imagined as Paris, Berlin, Zurich, New York, London, led ambitious artists to visit the places that they thought would position their careers at the fore. Air travel may not have produced the figure of the professional artist, but it has expanded the fold and brought about greater differentiation between a mobile professional class and one of sedentary amateurs. An impact on the ability of the artist to travel is also an impact on this achievement.
The logic of this assertion can be extended to theorisations of the artwork itself and from here back into the persona of the artist. Though evidence is inevitably anecdotal, the constraints of baggage allowance – both cost and volume – that accompany air travel will have precipitated the alignment of artistic production with the mobile body of the artist. Such a banal and perfunctory limitation might have altered the course of a tradition is at odds with pioneering accounts of art’s dematerialisation, because it does not make for a grand intellectual narrative.[i] Yet whatever theory of the contemporary you subscribe to, there is no denying that many of today’s leading concepts, relational art, the curatorial, performativity, would be inconceivable without air travel. In turn, the weightlessness and transportability of ideas in comparison to objects, will have contributed to the cultivation of intellectual capabilities and politically circumscribed personas on an international stage.
[i] See for example, Osborne, P. 2013. Anywhere or Not at All. Philosophy of Contemporary Art. Verso.
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Pandemic Landscapes. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Pandemic Landscapes. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Pandemic Landscapes. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
With the easing of lockdown in late June I visit the airport terminals. Terminal 5 is fronted by a Plaza on which sits a colossal work, Moving Worlds Night and Day. It is a 2008 commission by the British duo Langlands & Bell. Comprising two panels, one at either end of the concourse, it spells out airport codes from around the globe. They are written in neon and arranged in arcs, one per panel, which light up and dim again like a Mexican wave. Though the airport is open only for repatriation and cargo flights, no one has thought to switch the neon off. Its forlorn wave is made more so by the fact that it is also broken. A panel of shattered glass that forms the backdrop is threatening to fall to the ground from a height of about 3m. The area of plaza immediately in front of it has been closed off using a crowd control barrier. Only there is no crowd to contain. Indeed, there is no one here but me.
Moving Worlds is one of many artworks owned by the airport. The majority were commissioned through the BAA art programme (1994-1998) and all of them are by British artists. Its stated function: “to enhance passenger, staff and business partner experience of airport environments and develop an art collection of national merit” (BAA Art Programme 1997: 1). This collection is complemented by another, that of the resident airline, British Airways who between 1995 and 2012 collected some 1500 works to increase brand awareness and a new contemporary image for the airline (artrights.me). Though contemporary with the critical investigations of Rosler and Rhodes, these initiatives took the integration of the artist and aviation in a new direction. Unlike the critical investigations of Rosler and Rhodes, it established the artist as a direct beneficiary of the industry and an advocate of the regime. This backdrop offers a sense of just how much had changed by the Summer of 2020.
On arriving home, I notify Langlands and Bell by email of the damage to their sculpture. They tell me that they already know about it, having seen it a few weeks before on return from an exhibition in Ghana. They have no idea how it happened and sadly no one at T5 informed them about it. The artists are usually the last be informed about these events. They write on:
“As far as we remember the Contemporary Art Society, who acted as art consultants for BAA when we made it, negotiated or attempted to negotiate an agreement for the upkeep of the art work. However, BAA was bought out by Grupo Ferrovial while we were working on the piece and these organisations never seem to keep the necessary systems in place to maintain artworks and manage these kind of issues when they arise.”[i]
Nobody then is responsible for the sculpture. There isn’t even someone with whom to cooperate, neither to cover it up, repair it, or remove it. The image of fluorescent barriers protecting a phantom crowd from injury may be one that lasts. It serves as a lamp that beams affectivity and emotional charge on the radical and uncompromising bordering imposed by nation states in response to the pandemic. On the line drawn through those lives and livelihoods that privileged the mobile over the sedentary. Similarly, its repair, should it take place, will be a measure of the shape of art’s financial relationship with the airport in a post COVID landscape. Who will pay, how much, to whom, and under what terms? In the very act of pointing to these questions the work assigns a role for public art post COVID. Any answers it might provide will bring the work new and unexpected meanings that endow it with much needed realpolitik. The deep irony of its misadventure is that, possibly for the first time since its conception, it can be called public art.
In Spring 2021 the auction house Sotheby’s was appointed to sell prominent works from the British Airways Collection. It was deemed by now distasteful for an airline to harbour luxury goods while negotiating mass redundancies. The auction held on July 21 would include paintings, prints and works on paper by Young British Artists Hirst, Marc Quinn, Peter Doig, as well as the much-publicised Cool Edge by Bridget Riley, a painting that had once hung in the Concorde Room.
Perhaps the writing was on the wall, had we known how to read it. Imagine You’re Moving (1997) is a work by Julian Opie in the Flight Connections Centre at Terminal 1. It offers passengers a paired down landscape of fields and trees displayed on light boxes and the monitors that otherwise display flight information. Were it not for the a priori condition of British authorship, this could be pretty much anywhere. But as it is, these are evidently England’s merry green fields in a renationalised, post globalized world. Thus far they signal over a quarter of a century ago the presence of a dying system and point with cheery melancholy to the ruins in which I am standing today.
[i] Email correspondence with the author.
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Pandemic Landscapes. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Pandemic Landscapes. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Pandemic Landscapes. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
The damage to Moving Worlds does not appear accidental. The glass has been hit by something heavy and hard. Something about the size of a brick. TBC
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Penumbra. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Penumbra. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Penumbra. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
The airport in lockdown is set in relief by cultural revival in the surrounding neighbourhood. Bushy Park, to the south is teeming with children’s dens. Children have always made dens in this park. But I do not recall them in such numbers. Structures such as these point to a socio-cultural world of making against which official and/or administered arts are poised. Park dens rather than MoMA Heathrow, they seemed to say. The analogy of neurogenesis is useful. Just as, following a stroke, the brain establishes new neurological pathways, so, following the failure of cultural systems, other forces – curiosity, the imagination, and socially productive energies find fresh ways in which to exist.
Along the banks of the Thames, for instance between Kingston and Teddington Lock, also to the South, are more constructions. Some are built for thrill, for losing control. I try a rope swing and feel a release to the experience of confinement. It invokes Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void or the vertiginous slides of Carsten Holler that introduce a moment of madness, a so called “voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind” (Tate Modern). Considerable time has gone into making them. Also, money for rope, screws, and timber. This swing hangs from a branch about 12m up. There are no low branches on the trunk, meaning that it was installed by someone with equipment such as that used by a tree surgeon. The autonomy, formal diversity, and social capabilities of these subaltern works contrast favourably to commissions conditioned by the airport’s market-led, internationally orientated, and state-backed patronage. They provide a glimpse of horizontally structured, carbon efficient cultural practices, and precisely when the state and multinationals have failed. We could think of the pandemic as an instrument that has debordered art and life. Taken together, they paint a highly seductive portrait of a neighbourhood in which administered, international arts are superfluous. It is a picture flanked by others of cultural autonomy, flânerie and mutual aid, qualities that art criticism since the mid-1990s has associated with contemporary art’s political promise.
In his critique of urban planning under the Creative City concept, Jonathan Vickery enlists the deficit in creative energy among bureaucrats and engineers as its fundamental shortcoming. The pandemic has foregrounded others, specifically the mercurial nature of global corporations in times of duress, and the vulnerability of aviation’s economic model. The misadventure of Moving Worlds points to the need for relations with resilient and accountable organisations, whose priorities are the commitments that they have made. By nature, national and regional governments are best placed to deliver this. Heathrow’s abandonment of the arts stands in stark contrast to the funding provided by Arts Council England to beleaguered arts institutions. Thus, the pandemic has pointed to how art’s relationship with hegemony might be reset, as well as its relationship with the planet on which it is sustained. It has offered new beginnings that the political left has sought, even if not in a manner widely advocated.
It is now apparent that what is ahead in the airport landscape is behindness. Here, truths about our failure to acknowledge our entanglement with ecology show themselves first. Here the displacement of the analogue by the digital is most pronounced. Of course, the airport as metaphor for a future present has been under threat for a while. This imaginary belongs to the last century, and surely came to an abrupt end with 9/11. Yet the values it has nevertheless helped nurture live on in systems of international cultural exchange: museum loans, artist residency programmes, art fairs and biennials, to name just a few. It is an arrangement that has enabled artists to cultivate intellectual capabilities and politically circumscribed personas on an international stage. It is also an arrangement that has underpinned the concept of the contemporary in art, by which I mean the proposition that artists can be together in time. There would seem to be a binding relationship – a sine qua non – between contemporary art and airports. In which case, at large, and also at stake, in the airport landscape is now the figure of the contemporary artist.
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Penumbra. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Penumbra. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Penumbra. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Penumbra. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Penumbra. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
Nick Ferguson. 2020-21 Pandemic Landscapes. Fieldnotes from Heathrow Airport
Despite all that has been seen and said, a reinvigorated localism is not a future to celebrate. At least not on its own. The ubiquity of the park dens detracts from the fact that opportunities for making such structures remains uneven. There is all the difference between economically viable and non-economically viable versions of them in the long term. If you do not have financial support, through a gallery or grant, you won’t be able to carry on. In aesthetic terms they are also limited. They may look different in relation to each other, but their diversity is no match for that provided by curated programmes, such as those at Watermans Arts, a publicly funded arts centre nearby. In which case, a boundary between the professional and the amateur is essential for social mobility.
Whatever the hypocrisies inherent in contemporary art, however small the pool of supported artists may be, it sustains nevertheless a myriad of intercultural relations in an international arena. Travel disrupts territorial forms of order. It creates unexpected encounters that bring into proximity values that are often mutually exclusive. It is adjacency, often dissonant and uncomfortable, that residencies and international collaborations make possible.
The multiplicity of histories written through contemporary art stands over and against a cannon of Euro-American Modernism that is in urgent need of challenge. At stake in the curtailment of the contemporary is art’s capacity to speak to post-colonial discourses and to the social justice agendas that they underpin. The fact that contemporary art frequently functions to wash regimes and corporations makes art’s contribution in these areas more difficult, but it does not negate them.
Related to this is art’s ability to challenge neo-conservatisms that accompany the sedentary. The loss of international collaboration plays directly into the hands of nationalism – what David Harvey refers to as ‘militant particularism’ – a reactionary politics for which ‘think local’ is a way of rejecting the liberal commitment to inclusivity and diversity. Debates that might ordinarily transcend politics – the value of the local, the sustainability of global air travel – stand against vaccine nationalism, de-globalisation, and anti-immigration. From these observations a new question emerges: How can we reimagine art capable of fighting the climatic regime, while continuing to bring together knowledge of the world, from around the world?
[iii] Here I am interested in whether evidence of violence in artist and environment relations might be strongest in those sites the global economic system has deserted, places rendered remarkable not through the usual flux and flow but through stoppage. If so, those parts of the city where movement is ordinarily most pronounced – shopping and sightseeing districts in the centre, airports, industrial zones and motorways in the periphery – promise the most spectacular view.
[i] Philosopher and Sociologist Bruno Latour is in the latter camp. In an article of March 30, Protective Measures, he has encouraged us to reflect on what we would not want to go back to after the pandemic has passed. (2020).
[ii] For a discussion of the relevance of FA’s methodologies to the Anthropocene. See Turpin, E. (ed). 2013. Architecture in the Anthropocene. Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy. Open Humanities Press. Especially. pp 63 – 83. Matters of Calculation. The Evidence of the Anthropocene. Eyal Weizman in Conversation with Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin.
[iii] Here I draw on the American land artist Michael Heizer, particularly Double Negative, 1969-1970, 240,000-ton displacement of rhyolite and sandstone, Mormon Mesa, Overton, Nevada.
[i] See for example, Osborne, P. 2013. Anywhere or Not at All. Philosophy of Contemporary Art. Verso.
[i] Email correspondence with the author.
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Watling, T. 2021. Heathrow Airport a ghost town as passenger traffic down 90%. The Mail Plus. Available at: https://www.mailplus.co.uk/edition/travel/travel-news/85000/heathrow-airport-ghost-town-passenger-traffic-down
A version of this blog was also presented as After the Airport City. Thinking Art and Mobility Post COVID-19, RGS IBG Borders, Borderlands and Bordering. August 2021
Some images were presented at Im/mobile Lives in Turbulent Times. Methods and Practices in Mobilities Research. Northumbria University. July 8 – 9 2021. Curated Kaya Barry and Jen Southern. Available at: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/art-mobilities/nick-ferguson/