Landscapes of Heathrow: The Aircraft Landing Gear Compartment and the Politics of Global Transfer

Abstract

This paper, an output of an art research project, explores the agency of the aircraft landing gear compartment in global transfer. Through the prism of historical events involving aircraft preparing to land at London Heathrow, it reflects on the part played by the compartment in ecological and humanitarian struggle. Its theoretical frameworks include John Ruskin’s writing on geology, new materialism, and the planetary garden. These are brought into proximity with methodologies and collaborations developed through practice-based elements of the research, such as architectural modelling, geoforensic science and exhibition making. It incorporates an account of the process of reconstructing a compartment, as well as extracts from a microstratigraphic survey commissioned as part of the project. It examines the landing gear compartment’s capacity as a vessel in which dust, seeds, insects, pollen and even people are transported around the globe. It explores, too, its role as expository instrument, as far as it makes available for inspection the politics inscribed into its formal, spatial and temporal configuration. The paper argues that the wheel bay gives shape to a set of otherwise intangible aeromobilities, knowledge of which is integral to a nuanced understanding of the political geography of London Heathrow.