“I have finished my weekly supermarket shop, stocking up on provisions for my three kids, my husband, our dog and our cat. I push the loaded trolley across the car park, battling to keep its wonky wheels on track. I pop open the boot of my car and then for some reason, I have no idea why, I look up, into the clear blue autumnal sky. And I see him. It takes me a long moment to figure out what I am looking at. He is falling from the sky. A dark mass, growing larger quickly. I let go of the trolley and am dimly aware that it is getting away from me but I can’t move, I am stuck there in the middle of the supermarket car park, watching, as he hurtles toward the earth. I have no idea how long it takes – a few seconds, an entire lifetime – but I stand there holding my breath as the city goes about its business around me until…
The car park of Sainsbury’s supermarket in Richmond, southwest London, lies directly beneath one of the main flight paths into Heathrow Airport. Over the last decade, on at least five separate occasions, the bodies of young men have fallen from the sky and landed on or near this car park. All these men were stowaways on flights from the Indian subcontinent who had believed that they could find a way into the cargo hold of an airplane by climbing up into the airplane wheel shaft. It is thought that none could have survived the journey, killed by either the tremendous heat generated by the airplane wheels on the runway, crushed when the landing gear retracts into the plane after take off, or frozen to death once the airplane reaches altitude.
‘Flight Paths’ seeks to explore what happens when lives collide – an airplane stowaway and the fictional suburban London housewife, quoted above. This project will tell their stories.
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Through the fiction of these two lives, and the cross-connections and contradictions they represent, a larger story about the way we live today will emerge. The collision between the unknown young man, who will be both memorialised and brought back to life by the piece, and the London woman will provide the focus and force for a piece that will explore asylum, immigration, consumer culture, Islam and the West, as well as the seemingly mundane modern day reality of the supermarket car park itself. This young man’s death/plummet will become a flight, a testament to both his extreme bravery and the tragic symbolism of his chosen route to the West.
The initial goal of this project is to create a work of digital fiction, a ‘networked book’, created on and through the internet.
The first stage of the project, from November 2007 to May 2008 took place on this blog, opening up the research process to the outside world, inviting discussion of the large array of issues the project touches on. Contributions to the project – both multimedia and more traditional, including images, sounds, memories, and ideas began to arrive and we began to collect and curate them on a netvibes universe site, a web aggregator that allows curation of the web via the collection of fragments, RSS feeds, blogs, etc.
As the project grows it becomes more challenging to collect and order new material, and with the May-July 2009 relaunch we have revived the original blog for the project, and re-organised the material on the netvibes universe, hoping to make the project more accessible so that we can continue encourage and include all manner of contributions, from discussions to pieces of multimedia art.
Partners for this project include the IOCT at DMU (Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University). if:book, and Refugee Week. The project has been funded by Arts Council England, London.
There is no memorial to these young men, and this piece will seek to address that. We would like to work towards creating a permanent memorial in the car park itself.
As you can see, this is an exciting project that could prove to be ground-breaking in its engagement with the networked environment and all the possibilities this environment offers to writers and readers.
Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph
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