Flying with Covid: The visual presence of the pandemic in airports

Abstract

Since the beginning of 2020, with the eclosion of the Covid-19 pandemic, airports have been included among the main hotspots for the diffusion of the disease. Several limitations affected the possibility for people to travel, with diverse approaches between the countries, and with differences among who was authorized to travel and who was not. This caused a contraction on the number of passengers transiting in the airports in all the countries. However the commercial international aviation has never stopped, and despite the reduction of passengers the airports managed to implement health security protocols for the Covid-19 diffusion control. Before the pandemic, other challenges already affected airports’ security protocols, such as the “terrorist threat”, making of these places “nervous systems” (as defined by Maguire and Pétercsak). After one year and half from the beginning of the pandemic, with the vaccination campaigns accelerating in various countries (with the clear differences due to governments’ political choices and countries’ access to vaccines) the air travels have returned to a condition similar to previous one. An increasing number of planes flying and an increasing number of passengers can be registered everywhere. Meanwhile, the sanitary attention to the Covid-19 diffusion contention continues to be a concern in the space organization of airports.This ethnographic photoessay aims at describing the visual presence of the Covid in the airports. The work focuses on four airports in three countries the author passed through in June 2021. They are the airports of Salvador da Bahia (Brazil), Lisbon (Portugal), Rome and Venice (Italy). Despite the differences between the countries in the approached adopted to contain the diffusion of the pandemic, airports are subjected to standardized international protocols. These are intended to (re)produce similar safety measures in the diverse airports. Meanwhile, airports are designed not to be identitarian, historical and relational, but yes to be experienced as “non places” (as Augé defined these places). However, each airport introduces several dimensions of its specific location, of its specific local health politics, of its specific passengers’ flow, and so on, making of them a peculiar place to observe the space design for Covid diffusion control. Despite the definition of the Covid as an “invisible enemy”, used in general media in diverse countries, the thesis is that the presence of the virus is highly visible to everyone passing in some airport, independently from the specific country. Meanwhile, the diverse airports introduce their own local and specific visual modalities to achieve passengers. Pictures included in this ethnographic photoessay focus on some of these modalities, such as the hand gel dispensers, instructions and prohibitions for preventing Covid dissemination, among other. Covid’s aesthetics in airports highlights how the pandemic affected people visual and sensorial experiences of these places and of their designs.