“Duty Free Zone” is an exhibit that parodies the airport experience, addressing issues of borders, climate, tourism, consumerism and non-places. It questions the notion of duty-free, and challenges us to engage responsibility back into the discourse of an increasingly complex world of design.
Check-in
You arrive two hours in advance, as per your budget airline’s recommendation, yet the queue of soon-to-be holidaymakers is disturbingly long. Aggressively corralled from one cordoned path to the next, you familiarly follow a procession of water bottle chugging, undressing and redressing, and praying for once to not be singled out to splay your personal belongings before some badge clad official.
The color of the passport in your hands places you somewhere on a spectrum between local and foreigner. With a green bleep, your biometric data luckily aligns with the portal’s expectations. The suspense is over.
This rigamarole does not come without reward, for once you make it through, you find yourself in a cosmetic limbo, an international zone, the DUTY FREE ZONE.
Destination: Tax haven
You’ve now entered the duty free zone, the best the world has to offer, wrapped in tax-free incentives. Here you can cosplay how the 1% enjoy life. The duty-free shop is the mascot of the offshore global finance system; a rare public facing manifestation of a network of tax havens set up to circumvent national regulations.
Where exactly is “here” you ponder, rifling through the duty-free for a keychain with clogs or a shot glass with a palm tree to remind you which corner of the world you currently are in. “Here” is everywhere except where you are. You are in Marc Auge’s “non-place,” Rem Koolhaas’s “junk-space,” a hyper-commercialized landscape cleverly designed for crowds to slowly graze on a revolving selection of consumables. It is altogether familiar yet impossible to point to on a map, a clock or even your credit card statement.
It’s five o’clock somewhere
No one judges you for ordering a beer at seven in the morning, while your body’s clock is lagging somewhere between your departure and destination. In the local culture of duty-free, this beer represents freedom. Freedom from responsibilities, social norms, or any duties.
Does this make us exempt from all obligations? Duty-free insinuates that the individual has no responsibility, culpability or guilt; yet also no agency, power or vision.
The duty-free zone is pressure-free. Yet it is at the same time a restricted playground reserved for people with certain passports and finances. It is a trap, a paradise of convenience that binds us further to systems that widen inequalities outside of the airport.
“Duty Free Zone” usesengages topics including climate, over-consumption and mass tourism, exploring our own responsibilities as designers within an ever increasingly complex world.
