Quarantine Dreams, Part 1

By Helen Runting

It was dark when we left the fluorescently lit terminal. The tarmac radiated heat. The late-summer sun must have been hot that day—the contrast between the warmth in the air and the deep chill of the Swedish winter I had just left behind was visceral. A long line of people were pushing luggage trolleys across the bitumen apron towards a row of waiting busses. Marked police cars were parked alongside—these would, as it turned out, accompany us the whole way to the hotel, blue lights silently flashing. We were to be taken to mandatory quarantine for a period of 14 days. There were no active cases of the COVID-19 virus in the state of Western Australia at that time, and all incoming human bodies were to be treated as biohazards until proven otherwise. Not only were bodies ascribed Trojan Horse-like qualities, in this pandemic moment, but they were also subjected to a double enclosure: in potentially incubating a virus within them, these bodies would have to be contained in incubator-like spaces carved out of the everyday architecture of the city (hotels, airports, buses).

“The dynamic machines for penetrating secrets and unlocking resources have helped set up a world-spanning grid of storage and distribution, containment and supply,” comments the philosopher Zoë Sofia, “… both ‘means of adaptation’ are intimately interconnected in the late modern technological complex.”1 Quarantine is located at the nexus between containment and distribution: it constitutes an architecture of mandatory, but consensual, self-storage that subjects the privileged bodies of skilled labor transfer or returning citizen-subjects (the only two groups of people able to enter Australia at present) to a temporary period of stasis. Quarantine is a pause designed to enable flow.2 In this essay, which is to be published in three parts, and was partially written in quarantine in Perth, Western Australia, I reflect on the way in which quarantine measures reveal architecture’s biopolitical capacities, offering an affirmative reading of the political potential of the space that it creates.

Part 1: Carousel

Before the bus, there was a plane. Several planes, in my case—one from Arlanda to Doha, and another from Doha to Perth. The plane travel was a blur, I was exhausted and slept the whole way behind my facemask. Upon arrival at Perth Airport, the route from the airbridge carefully threaded through the outer layer of the terminal building, avoiding the usual high-gloss, high-ceilinged, commercial throughfares of the main terminal building. My group of passengers was efficiently channeled through an e-Gate at some point, directed to download an app, and asked to answer a long list of questions. “Where will you be staying?” and “How long will you be in Western Australia?” and “What is the purpose of your trip?” Brain-numb after a 24-hour flight and a 9-hour layover, answering the list seemed almost impossible. I wasn’t meant to be in Perth, I had no purpose in this city, and I did not know where I would be staying or for how long. Perth is 3,460 kilometers and 3 time zones away from Melbourne, which was where I was headed. A “circuit-breaker lockdown” had been imposed the night before in the State of Victoria, and Melbourne Airport was temporarily closed. I had no idea when it would be possible to enter Melbourne again, and the airline had decided that Perth, a mining capital of two million people on the west coast of the continent, was “close enough” for the purposes of storing living bodies for two weeks of quarantine.

The queue which led us through the terminal, the baggage hall, and border control turned out to be a loop that eventually deposited us back amongst the baggage carousels. Cheap plastic garden chairs had been lined up in a neat grid to form a makeshift waiting room. This space, with its black rubber conveyor belts, low suspended ceiling, fluorescent lighting, and temporary furniture was trying its very best to be boring. Nevertheless, the mood was erratic and jumpy: death-stares were cast at those with runny noses, those who sneezed, or coughed, or came too close. We were all potential biohazards: whilst everyone had arrived infection-free (you had to provide proof of a negative COVID-19 Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test result in order to board the plane), we would need to stay this way, if we were to be allowed to leave quarantine in fourteen days’ time. I’d never thought about the baggage carousels at airports in any depth before: they belong to a space that perceptually retreats in the face of greedily anticipatory dreams of a final destination and the onerous task of spotting a bag in a line of almost identical others. It struck me how austere this part of an airport is, sitting there, that evening: it is almost totally devoid of the decorative impulses of what Pine and Gilmore have described as the “Experience Economy.”3 Beyond the illuminated signage affixed to one wall, showing enticing images of Western Australian beaches and a luxury watch ad, there were no plush furnishings, no indoor plants, no mirrors, no chandeliers. This space, I reflected, confuses the separation between “back of house” service corridor and atmospheric interior that architect Hannes Frykholm describes in relation to the casinos of Las Vegas.4 Compared to the plush representational spaces of welcome that we call “lobbies,” the baggage carousel is an anti-lobby, a space of exit, a loading dock that is fully accessible to the publics of the airport, not hidden away or separated off. Clean and industrial, it does little to hide its functionality, and its utilitarian wipe-down aesthetic came off as brutally medical, like an emergency room staffed with border control officers, or a slaughterhouse, that night. The conveyor belts did not help.

The brutal affect of the hall seemed to have been considered by the architects of this temporary procedural space: two impossibly friendly women in their early 50s were given the task to chat to each person, answering any questions and making small talk with the confused and tired line of people making their way towards the seating area. This strategy was to become familiar after a few days: throughout the two-week period, female nurses called my room every two to three days to see how I was doing and chat for 10 minutes. The (feminized) “affective labor” performed in these acts of instrumentalized hospitality, I came to understand, was crucial to the atmospheric architecture of quarantine: rather than stimulating consumption (as in the examples of the affective labor of casino workers explored by Frykholm), these acts were here employed to instill a sense of atmospheric calm. They constituted a call to inaction, subduing their audience by making things feel “normal”. “How are you, love?” the lady asked me when it was my turn. Taking her time, she reassured me that there would be internet at the hotel, cracking a joke about Netflix before sending me to a chair.

When it was finally time to leave, a half-hour or so later, we were escorted through a large roller door. “Outside” turns out to have been only meters away: the carousel bands thread through a space that directly fronts the tarmac apron. In no time, we were negotiating multiple gates and fences in the repurposed public transport busses allocated for the purpose. They smelled like disinfectant; our luggage was piled up at the front. I had been given the name of the hotel earlier and tried to trace our journey on Google. At some point, I started to nod off. I remember having no idea how long we were on the bus. This was the fourth vehicle I’d sat in since leaving Rågsved, leaving Stockholm, leaving Sweden, and leaving Doha. It was well over 30 hours since I left home. The bus felt like it was part of the airport, and we were, after all, still in transit: I had no destination to anticipate beyond a hotel room in a city I’d never visited.

The baggage hall, the e-gate, and the airbridge, had for the first time been nakedly exposed for the production line mechanisms that they always were. Perhaps the shiny commercial thoroughfares of the airport are less there to induce acts of consumption as to assure us that we are not our own cargo, I mused, in the flashing lights of the police escort. It was time to enter the next container technology of the journey. Self-storage awaited us.

Helen Rix Runting is an architectural theorist (PhD. Arch) and urban planner; she is co-founder of the Stockholm-based architecture office Secretary, co-editor of the public art project Stockholmstidningen, and Research Fellow in Architectural Theories and Critical Practices at the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne.

1 Zoë Sofia, “Container Technologies,” Hypatia 15, no. 2 (2000): 198.

2 For further thinking on the notion of ”pause” in architecture, see Sepideh Karami, Interruption: Writing a Dissident Architecture, PhD Diss. KTH (Stockholm: KTH, 2018).

3 B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).

4 Hannes Frykholm, Building the City from the Inside: Architecture and Urban Transformation in Los Angeles, Porto, and Las Vegas, PhD Diss. KTH (Stockholm: KTH, 2020).