After flight. Visions from London Heathrow

Abstract

This paper uses creative methodologies to explore the future of relations between art and flight. Responding to the conditions of the pandemic, I take Heathrow Airport, which is near my home, as an observable and symbolic landscape inflected with art’s mobilities but also a window onto changing times. I draw on material gathered within the constraints of the lockdown walk – diary notes, photographs, correspondence – as well as theoretical framings that include planetary social thought, evidentiary forms of materialism and aesthetic reflections on the modern ruin. I ask: what axioms and assumptions about art and flight are unsettled by this landscape? What is revealed about relations between art and the planetary? And what possible futures does it offer artists striving to square internationalism with ecological consciousness?In the context of a climate crisis, the deserted airport is suggestive of a catastrophic future that reads as an allegory of fossil fuel dependence. Yet the complexity of disentangling art from flight, an inherently carbon hungry mode of transport, should not be underestimated – it will need to negotiate not just the terrain of environmental impact but also the artistic identities, exhibition models and curatorial personas that have flourished under the conditions of cheap flight.