HEATHROW:THE PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY OF PARANOIA.

“In every case, the state of exception marks a threshold at which logic and praxis blur with each other and a pure violence without logos claims to realize an enunciation without any real reference" Giorgio Agamben.

"Of many shifts , blandly cunning, a robber, a cattle driver, a bringer of dreams, a watcher by night, a thief at the gates, one who was soon to show forth wonderful deeds among the deathless gods." Chalked on the roadside were words lifted from a Homeric hymn to Hermes.

Heathrow is a tangle of paranoia, to traverse the perimeter is to dodge clusters of armed coppers. We edge beneath the razor wire of a forlorn camp , a guarded non space mutating into a contemporary locus of struggle. Middle England just this side of the fence, clinging to heritage and hanging baskets,, no site clothes/work boots, no third runway daubed on George cross banners, who do yOU align yourself with? Immigration removal centres, privatised prisons, they're not keen, they don't want them coming in, and they don’t like unhealthy proles holidaying in Spain much either.
Terrorism, a word almost drained of its psychotic cravings by the anodyne platitudes mouthed on ABC lurks in the infrastructure. Does anyone really believe in it? Conspiracy theories abound, there’s a retreat into the escapism of fantasy lands, the irrational.

The three magpies, relic of the 70’s, nothing really changed, a saccharine rendition of’silent night’ on the juke box, it’s August. We’re ignored for a long time and when I get my tea it’s lukewarm and the little cup only half full, its like tea you get from a flask. Its Monday afternoon so there’s just us and a couple of baggage handlers. We leave the faux heritage of this Edwardian tudor and head for the patio bar which is actually some tables and a fence and a car park then the airport. It’s an out of time zone, where people come to have clandestine encounters, a few drinks before a dash to the Renaissance hotel. Its a place of undertable powder slipping and hawkers peddling stuff off the luggage truck. You get it now, or its on its way to the auction house in Tooting love. Julie’s had everything in here, mainly perfume and stuff, specially since the ban on hand luggage and liquids, some nice stuff, expensive, all sorts really. Julie grew up in Bradford, she used to be married to a biker, she had tattoos and loved the allegiance of belonging to a tribe. Then there was feuding and he got nasty and she swapped her council house in Bradford for a flat in Hounslow, it was a clean break,a fresh start..,here in this transit zone everyone was just passing through, she could just disappear. It was her and the Polish and the Somalians and Sikhs and everyone, loads of Polish everywhere, all the pubs and shops turning Polish now. Used to be that a lot of the pubs closed and turned into boring stuff like burglar alarm fitting businesses cos the Asians didn’t really use them so much but now the Poles are bringing them back to life.
The three magpies is alright, she’s been working there three years. Strangely, for a transit zone you get your regulars, blokes from the airport. Then there’s lads from nearby up on a weekend, mainly for the karaoke and late licence, airport meant it was easy to get one, funny hours people work and us with no neighbours to annoy. Outside this strictly controlled zone we had this little pocket that was almost operating outside the law. We had all sorts going on, a lot of young ones off their heads but the old bill never looking in.

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James had lived along the perimeter his whole life. As a child he would climb up into the attic, using the slightly rickety pull down ladder, to gaze through the small skylight window, in order to snatch a better view of the terminal building. An arched glass structure that seemed to cut the sky like the blade of the scythe his father kept in a special locked trunk in the garden shed. The panes of glass of the terminal building would catch the sun, sending beams of light like lasers shooting across the no mans land that separated the terminal building from James’s suburban semi as though they had been aimed directly into the small attic. Some times the flashes of light would appear to have some sort of meaning, a regular pulse then a gap, another flash, then a long wait followed by an intense beam. James felt that these patterns of light were forming an undecipherable message, one that was beckoning to him over the fence that ran further than he had walked to both the east and west.

As James sat looking through the fence, coiled wire, car parks and long track of shimmering grey runway that marked the perimeter, he would sometimes dream of being one of the dark suit clad figures he occasionally glimpsed boarding the aircraft. It had been fifteen years now since the Green Party had taken power, two years before James was born, and the emergency powers restricting all long distance travel for all but the wealthy and the political elite had been imposed

…………………… TO BE CONTINUED………………MAYBE………………..

.rupture.

A Drift through the ruins of Post Modernism

We have traced the ruins of Post Modernism along the flight paths radiating from the Genius Loci of the Airport.

The Airport has shifted from the once ultimate post-modern experience, a non-space in which all sense of time and place was suspended, to a locus of struggle and Conflict in which all the anesthetising tenants of postmodernism have been shattered.

Al Qaeda as they sat suspended in the placeless and timeless ambiance of the departure lounge understood in an instance that they where the first truly post-modern fighters, decentered and Deterritorialised, detouring the ultimate symbols of modernity, the airplane and the Skyscraper, in order to puncture simulacra so deep that the momentary stench of the rotting flesh of the real was revealed. A stench so strong that only a new paradigm could mask the scent. A paradigm that would lay waste to post-modernism and aim for our own ideological mobalisation in its support.

The Airport has become the flashpoint of contestation from climate change, terrorism, surveillance technologies, immigration and the transfiguration of the future body.

The We Are Bad Collective are engaged in experimental research exploring the lines of flight connecting the Airport to the ruins of Post Modernism.

Sculpture For Airports

Sculpture for Airports proposes a democratisation of the security at airports by rerouting the naked images of travellers produced by the Rapiscan Secure 1000 scanner, to the portrait mounted flat screen TVs used for plane timetables. This will result in an interactive artwork that both references classical art history and the early experiments in photography carried out by Edward Muybridge, whilst allowing travellers the opportunity to take responsibility for their own security by keeping a lookout for concealed suspect devices.

.rupture.