Between Translation and Translocation: How Art Sensorially Explodes Language in the Airport Space

After Bataille, one can argue that, like the “castle, church, temple, or palace” before, nowadays the airport terminal—as elementary architecture of modern urban communication—emerges as a “grand didactic monument.” Erected to manage landside movement prior to flight, the air terminal as a techno-capitalist structure axiomatically operates with language, thus training the sensorium. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical toolbox, in the first part of this essay, I will elucidate how language, spatially deployed in the airport, operates as a system of order-words. In doing so, I will account for how translation moves away from textual experience to become a logistic and increasingly automated procedure, thus contributing a negative understanding of air terminal space as an alienating non-place. Curiously, leading airports are simultaneously incorporating art to create unique and memorable encounters which enhance passenger experience by constructing a sense of place. In the latter part, I will engage with Eve Fowler’s A Universal Shudder, exhibited at LAX in 2022, exploring aesthetic manners in which it configures language and/in the air terminal. I propose that this artwork heightens awareness not so much of art as art (in the airport), but rather of the translocating power of language itself, which it sensorially stimulates. Consequently, the pragmatics of translation will be shown to coincide with a political aesthetic of translocation, which explodes the airport regime of order-words, thus yielding a novel mode of experiencing and understanding the air terminal.