Oscar Bray, Fiona Lin, and Ioanna Orphanide, Introduction

INTRODUCTION

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the global lockdown that followed, it becomes more important than ever for us to consider the ways in which we connect with others. As we began formulating our ideas for this issue of Airport Road, our editorial board came to the understanding that the pandemic has been an isolating and difficult time for all, but that growth can come from that hardship. This issue’s unofficial theme of “inside” was born from this understanding—that despite, or perhaps because of, the isolation and restrictions that fell upon us in a period so unprecedented and unstable, we’ve come to reflect on our contexts, on our situations, and on ourselves.

Returning to campus in fall 2021 was a relief, to say the least, and even a lifeline for many of us. That being said, the impact of two years of enforced isolation from each other—and from the space that many could consider a second home—didn’t disappear instantly. We still took classes over Zoom for the first two weeks of the semester, the Omicron variant ravaged the world for months, and the pandemic has arguably changed our generation’s ‘normal’ for good. This is why we believe that now more than ever, we need art to remind ourselves of how to connect through difference and diversity. Whether this variety is shown through medium, language, subject matter or simply individual style, we at Airport Road hope that the works we have compiled serve as comforting challenges that will help you think and feel beyond whatever walls confine you.

Our consideration of the idea of “inside” is twofold. First, it is a reflection of our physical situation over the past two years and the remnant of an experience that will continue to affect us for years to come, even as we walk out of the shadows of the pandemic and begin to rebuild. Second, it is an engagement with interiority, with identity, with the individual who remains when external factors cease to exist. And so we asked: who are

we when we are left alone? How do we navigate a world that is reduced to one room or one space, and what becomes of our ability to expand within that space? How does artmaking become a medium through which we reach into ourselves and into the world around us to explore and discover whatever spaces we can find?

The work in Airport Road 13 has engaged with, challenged, and transformed these questions. We’ve felt, through each word, each line, and each stroke of color, the ways in which our community has proved their resiliency in the face of our changing contexts, the perspectives they’ve begun to explore in this period of contradictory aloneness and togetherness, and the lessons we’ve all begun to absorb.

The negotiation of differences is never straightforward, and the opening up of the world has inevitably paved the way for prejudice and all the violence it begets. It should be no surprise that much of the work we received meditates on these themes and the damage that these fights for power and agency can cause to the psyche of people and communities. “The Wide Fit” and “The Universe Within The Black Woman” focus on racial otherness, while the poems “On The Fence” and “feet on the street” confront more generally how conflict manifests through protest and discourse. We see feelings of uncertainty baked into the structures of the texts, as “Journey Of Exploration” and “Hit In The Marrow” use translation as sites of internal struggle.

With this issue, the journal’s embrace of difference extends to the idea of form. The editorial board is thrilled that for the first time, we began accepting and publishing multimedia submissions. It only seemed appropriate given that when we were all stuck inside, technology became the key mediator not just for communication but for entertainment, closing off our world as well as opening it. By now, it is something of a

cliche to point out this double-edged dependence, but it continues to hold true, as the multimedia projects represented here demonstrate in different ways.

The text-based adventure game “Nothing To Fear” places you in a world where going outside puts you under intense scrutiny from a corrupt government, but staying indoors leaves the protagonist with their own paranoia and dread of others. “Impromptu Op. COVID No. 19” was created as a direct response to being limited as a filmmaker by home quarantine, with the film exploring the possibilities in limited space while acknowledging the frustrations of involuntary artistic constraint. You will find URLs and QR codes for these pieces in the pages of the periodical and on the webpage devoted to this issue. We hope that future issues of Airport Road will continue to feature innovative and thoughtful experiments in form and inspire other artists to try out new approaches to storytelling and art.

In many cultures, the number “13” is thought to be unlucky, an omen of ill. With Airport Road 13, we declare that we are not bound by that kind of fatalism. We declare that we are at once freed and confined by the state of the “inside,” by the gaps between our situation and our interiority, and that we carry within us the means to connect these existences, to emerge from the inside, more brilliantly than before.

—Oscar Bray, Fiona Lin, and Ioanna Orphanide