Local Date

27 May 2024

Local Time

12:36

Location

Hackney Downs, London

Country or Territory

United Kingdom

Name

Sasha Engelmann

Satellite

NOAA-18

Radio Callsign

M6IOR

Archive ID

ow397

King of Hearts lying listlessly in the grass, crumpled from hands, wind and rain, and ripped (possibly burned?) on one of its edges. A woman and a dog walk past, and the dog makes a wide circle, looking at me inquisitively. "You must get many such looks of suspicion!" jokes the woman. A corner of Svalbard - Spitsbergen - appears at the top of the satellite image as I manage to capture the transmission from the 'High North', much earlier than usual, by standing on my tiptoes and stretching the antenna above my head and at a semi-parallel angle with the ground. I generally avoid such acrobatics as I usually run out of my flat and set up my station only moments before the pass starts, missing the noise from the North. My t-shirt threatens to come out of my denim jeans. For some weeks, a tent has been quietly living under the shade of the vines next to the bike parking area where Downs Road meets the park, and today there is a piece of laminated A4 paper saying '7 day notice'. The notice looks ridiculous strapped to the fabric of the tent with a black zip tie. The absurdity of the notice and the underlying violence it represents reminds me of D Asher Ghertner's (2020) work exploring how contemporary architectures of space and atmosphere "draw from colonial logics of bodily sequestration from outside threats". In other words, we are not just 'living' and 'breathing' the last several centuries of colonialism, extraction and exploitation building up as heat and toxicity in the air (as suggested by Denise Ferreira da Silva), we are also living and breathing "durable spatial dispositions governing how atmospheres are felt, arranged, and imagined". In other words, we are living and breathing ways of engineering and creating air/space that can be traced to the racialisation of the lungs of bodies of colour, the architectures of 'hilltop sanitoriums' where the wealthy could breathe 'clean air', and the personal technology of the air pollution mask, which has a very long history that far predates covid-19 or recent air pollution debates (Ghertner, 2020). Attempts at 'climates of enclosure' that work differently, like that of the streetcorner tent, and that engineer airspaces for those in crisis, are 'given notice' precisely because of this history.

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