You enter a blacked-out room, large projector screens around you. You feel you are in the grounds of a farm wedged between airport runways. A full day of events happens in 15 minutes and it is very very noisy.
But you’re not on that farm, at Narita Airport in Japan. You’re in Manchester, at the Whitworth Art Gallery on Oxford Road. You’re at a free exhibition called “Air Pressure,” which runs until February 5th.

The exhibition has been created by Rupert Cox, from the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, Angus Carlyle, a sound artist and Reader at the University of the Arts, London, in collaboration with Professor Kozo Hiramatsu. The latter is Japan’s “foremost acoustic scientist and UK president of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science”.

The exhibition is a hard-hitting expose of the social and environmental costs attached to the expansion of Narita Airport, but the lessons are far broader. Can we continue using up irreplacable natural resources, displacing species that can never be replaced? Can we continue to force others – the stubborn, the poor, the powerless, to pay for the “convenience” of flying?

I hope readers go to this exhibition, and ask themselves these questions

Dama Kudoja, who has started writing for MCFly

References

Picture

http://ummhello.tumblr.com/post/12369093883/air-pressure-documents-the-cultural-clash-between

Recommended Books

Carr, M. (1997) New Patterns: process and change to human geography.

Hall, P.I. (2002) Bamboozled!: how America loses the intellectual game with Japan and its

implications for our future in Asia

Heller, A. M. (2010) The Gridlock Economy How Too Much Owners

Hugo, D. (2003) Japan and United Nations peace making New pressures, New processes

Stanley, B., Cutter, S. and Harrington, W. J. (2004) Geography and technology