DOES GOD LIVE IN THE NO-FLY ZONE
collaboration with KIT, 2009 photographs and an audio installation ‘Symphony for No Fly Zones’

Does God Live In The No-Fly Zone is a collaboration between The KIT Collaboration (UK/Canada) and S.E. Barnet (UK/USA). The project is a union of both artists interest in photographic and sonic documentation of phenomena that is not spatially definable - in this case No Fly-Zones - whilst also articulating a shared research interest in the ways that civic environments are re-spatialized by military techniques and strategies.

In an examination of the invisible barriers above our heads, Barnet and KIT take a look at restricted airspace – the ‘No-Fly Zone’ above all Heads of State’s dwellings (ie. 10 Downing Street, Matignon, Paris etc) as a means of questioning military techniques and strategies of spatialization. The sound consists of national anthems (from each country that a No-Fly Zone is photographed in), slowed down to a 12-hour pieces, resulting in a set of drones overlaying each other.

In an examination of the invisible barriers above our heads, The KIT Collaboration and S.E. Barnet look at restricted airspace – the No- Fly Zone above all Heads of State’s buildings. The photographs of the installation function as a means of questioning the military techniques and strategies of spatialization that reorient our perspectives, orientations, and activities within the urban environment of the everyday. The No-Fly Zone is an interesting spatiality to conceive of as it opens up a vertical channel from the earth, akin to a military gateway for ascension. Any notion of looking for a deity in a No-Fly Zone is however absurd and futile, as pointless as making territorial boundaries in the sky, as exemplified by the aerial transgressions witnessed globally on 9/11.

Searching for a higher being in a security zone questions the ascendancy of martial space over the spatiality of a sky that was once theoretically structured by religious doctrine. Today’s sky is anything but metaphysical filled as it is with the verse and chapter of the military industrial complex. Our modern notion of ascension has lost its impetus due to the implementation of this set of military markers that have cut up the sky and re-rendered the trajectory of escape velocity as a surveilled, guarded, and gated vector. We are not proposing that this replacement of metanarratives is a loss to our culture; we are more interested in the ways in which official discourses which attempt to explain space, movement and our presence and absence within them, fight for the same abstract terrain, so that they can rearticulate the parameters of our everyday existence and perception

Does God Live in the no-Fly Zone was exhibited Occurance - Espace d’art et d’essai contemporains in Montreal Canada and Five Years in London, UK