Progress Post: February 2021

In spring 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic severely impacted air travel around the globe. Two aspects of air travel were foregrounded by the pandemic; the socio-economic inequalities of this mode of transport; and its latent materiality.[1] Across the globe, populations are sheltering indoors. Repeated lockdowns across Europe, a huge market, severely curtailed the volume of international aviation. Oil traded in April 2020 at negative prices; the on-stream infrastructures of fuel production proceed with tremendous momentum and are too invested to stop.[2]

The route between London and Hong Kong was particularly affected by Covid. Entry to Hong Kong by air has been limited to residents who must quarantine on arrival for 21 days. New variants of the virus emerging in the UK have led to bans on direct air travel to Hong Kong.[3] The city has a recent history of witnessing viral outbreaks, SARS in 2003 being a notable precursor to Covid. Since the flu pandemic of 1968, virologists have identified the city as a sentinel territory for detecting new viral pathogens, predicted to emerge from southern China. [4] New realms of material mobility and spatiality have been revealed by the pandemic. Unfolding political changes in Hong Kong have also impacted the mobility of its people and the spatial imaginaries of the city.

Given these contexts, Hong Kong can be freshly understood as a layered, liminal space at the intersection of multiple social, financial, material and biological assemblages, mobilities and entanglements. This snapshot provisional video, exhibiting a compare and contrast mode, montages some of these issues at the present moment. This is a fertile and generative research area that will reward further investigation, visual studies work and filmmaking.



Notes
[1] Oil at Negative Prices
[2] Hong Kong Arrival and Entry Regulations
[3] An ethnographic account of the intersection of birds, virology and the city states of Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, see Keck, F. (2020) Avian Reservoirs: Virus Hunters and Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts.