Intervention: Displacement Aesthetics

13 Intervention: Displacement Aesthetics Kaya Barry and Peter Adey Emergency diagrams, instructions for evacuation, safety cards, and pictographic displays inform how and where mobile bodies should move in exceptional circumstances. During times of danger, insecurity, panic, and disruption, these informational diagrams guide the movements and behaviours of the general public. Yet in daily life, these diagrams go largely unnoticed, sitting in the background of transit spaces, vehicles, vessels, or aircrafts. We might encounter them through the swift gesture during a safety induction, in a presentation from a flight attendant, or an automated security announcement. Bright colours, large arrows, and pictographics attempt to stimulate our attention, alongside generic shapes of human bodies that enacting complicated evacuation and safety procedures. The emergency diagram, airline safety card, and the ridiculous safety video attempt to stimulate passenger/audiences to do something in order to care for their safety in emergency. They have increasingly been drawn to humour, with strange juxtapositions and metaphors to encourage the public’s response (Bissell et al. 2012). In this intervention we reflect on a series of artworks produced by Kaya Barry in response to the K. Barry (*) Griffith University, Nathan, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] P. Adey Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 P. Adey et al. (eds.), The Handbook of Displacement, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47178-1_13 173 174 K. Barry and P. Adey abstracted designs and obscure spatial depictions of emergency instructions. The artworks are adapted from examples and illustrations found in aircraft ‘safety cards’—the laminated cards that are found in the pocket of the seat in front during air travel. These creative responses are intended to provide what Barry has elsewhere called ‘alternative ways of knowing and accessing affective experiences [and] techniques to engage and complement the wide range of mobilities encountered in air travel, as well as everyday experiences of movement’ (Barry 2017, p. 367). The images are material-representational discursive compositions of bodies, movements, anticipatory affects, and expressivities, which are diagrammed into prescriptive sequences of action and comportment. They conjure up emergency situations that are made unimaginable for most, but in the most subduing, glossy kinds of ways. For the majority of the travelling public, these ‘what if ’ speculative scenarios of evacuation, forceful eviction, or disaster response are an ‘aesthetics of transit’ (Barry 2017) that lie in the peripheries of our attention. They continue, to some extent, a classed and romantic aesthetic of travel and mobility, reinforcing the ideals of the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ types of persons undertaking a journey. Bodies take the form of either generic figures of passengers or the glamorous attendants who effortlessly demonstrate how to deploy lifeboats, inflate jackets, and open emergency doors (Fig. 13.1). However, these emergency diagrams have gained a new meaning through contemporary representations of forced migration and displacement. No longer are these passive objects and images for possible future ‘worst case’ scenarios of evacuation and emergencies. The proliferation of materials from the 2015–2016 ‘global refugee crisis’ has been collected, documented, and exhibited by artists around the world. Artworks that take form through arrangements of life jackets, rafts, foil blankets, and washed-up passports and belongings appear alongside photographs and documentation of these perilous journeys in galleries, exhibitions, and cultural institutions, as well as extensive media coverage of these visuals. The result is a charged aesthetics of mobilities—where the textures, colours, consistencies, and surfaces of such materials are amplified (Fig. 13.2). These materials ‘destabilise and unsettle the unusual public passivity to seeing these material traces of migration. … They are right here-and-now, tangible and forcibly present’ (Barry 2019, p. 209). The oversaturation of these objects, and the hypervisibility of such emergency diagrams, now pervades public attention. They signify far more precarious situations and journeys. These are new contexts where the experiences hinted at in the emergency diagrams are now commonplace. The stylisation 13 Intervention: Displacement Aesthetics Fig. 13.1 Inflation (night) (Kaya Barry 2019) Fig. 13.2 Inflation (life vest) (Kaya Barry 2016) 175 176 K. Barry and P. Adey of emergency diagrams becomes a kind of bridge between contexts of luxury and safety in travel to those experiences of precarity and displacement. The mutation from preemptive and passive objects of evacuation and disaster mitigation to the now highly charged association with perilous refugee journeys recasts emergency diagrams into a new aesthetics of displacement mobilities. These representations of mobility, secured through the depiction of materials of transit and emergency, are now ‘enfolded with the threat’ of the unknown traveller (Hall 2015, p. 19). Here, im/mobilities are recast through a pervasive aesthetic of the desirable, permitted, and ‘good’ traveller that lies in opposition to the illegal, suspicious, and undesirably anonymous body of the migrant. At the same time, there may be some hope. A different kind of displacement and mobility politics is possible within this kind of aesthetic. On the one hand the diagrams bifurcate emergency displacement mobility into oppositions relying upon expected and structural orientations by way of wealth and class, race, (non)citizenship, gender, ableism, and so on. On the other, at least imaginatively, and even if they are relatively abstract—the bodies occupying the rubber inflatable rafts (Fig. 13.3) are silhouetted figures—they Fig. 13.3 Emergency exit (water) (Kaya Barry 2019) 13 Intervention: Displacement Aesthetics 177 may erode those distinctions by placing travellers into intimate proximity with the experiences of others. Creative approaches that appropriate transit aesthetics in this manner may also, paradoxically, prove more accessible than the official airline safety card or emergency instruction diagrams. Although the artworks depict people appearing calm, complacent, and willing to obey in the most extreme circumstances, the spatialisation of bodies and materials in such abstracted environments amplifies the universal nature of these possible scenarios. We wonder whether, just in the way emergency politics may be harnessed more democratically (Honig 2009), that instead of the articulation of migrant displacement as an emergency for the sovereignty of bordered states, the diagrams present those travels as in common and as possible. They are not only an emergency situation but a durable and normal condition for others. The emergency is that this is happening to anyone at all and that urgent action is necessary to protect and care for those precarious journeys at all costs. References Barry, K. (2017). The aesthetics of aircraft safety cards: Spatial negotiations and affective mobilities in diagrammatic instructions. Mobilities, 12(3), 365–385. Barry, K. (2019). Art and materiality of the global refugee crisis: Ai Weiwei’s artworks and the emerging aesthetics of mobilities. Mobilities, 14(2), 204–217. Bissell, D., Hynes, M., & Sharpe, S. (2012). Unveiling seductions beyond societies of control: Affect, security, and humour in spaces of aeromobility. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30(4), 694–710. Hall, R. (2015). The transparent traveller. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Honig, B. (2009). Emergency politics: Paradox, law, democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.