Jenny Polak

These images come from ‘Uncontrol Towers’ - an architectural performance proposal I made in 2018.

Both symbolic and functional, the towers reinvent the traditionally futuristic airport control tower to call out the little-known end-stage of the US deportation program, exemplified by Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s take-over of Gary Airport.

The static airport control tower is confronted by multiple towers in convoy, hijacking the visual language of dominance and exclusion to demand empathy and inclusivity. Upon arrival of the blacked out vans of deportees, amplified words from the towers transgress physical barriers with messages of love.

The ten 25-foot tall light-weight ‘assembly required’ towers, activated in a series of community driven mobilized spectacles connecting Gary with its airport perimeter, amplify organized local resistance to deportation as manifested in the use of isolated Gary Airport for deportation flights.

The performance transforms an architectural vocabulary of supposedly civilian airports associated with free movement, into a critique of the secretive forced migration operation at Gary Airport .

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