If you look skyward on the fourth of July in the United States, you can usually expect to see fireworks burst forth above towns and cities as people celebrate Independence Day.
This year, in the sunny skies above the land of the free, the loaded question of independence – for whom, and on whose terms? – was brought into clear focus by sky-typing planes that wrote messages including “CARE NOT CAGES”, “ABOLISH ICE” and “ESTOY AQUI” (“I’m here”) above detention facilities, immigration courts, borders, and historically significant sites in dozens of cities across the US.
The messages were part of In Plain Sight, an artwork by a coalition of 80 artists and activists. Over the course of a number of weeks, these messages will be delivered to the sky by two fleets of five planes. Founded by the interdisciplinary artists Cassils and rafa esparza, In Plain Sight is as ambitious in its scale as it is in its intention: working towards the abolition of immigrant detention and the US culture of incarceration.
“I was shocked to learn that there are over 50,000 people in detention at any given moment, and that this is a for-profit industry,” says Cassils, who is Canadian but lives in Los Angeles.
“This is a humanitarian crisis. And it’s hiding in plain sight, thus the title. The idea is to really use the skywriting as a way of piercing through electoral politics, to focus on the fact that this is not a partisan issue.”
There’s poetry to the skyward messages of In Plain Sight. It is literally visible, perhaps through windows of detention facilities, by the people whose liberation the action works towards. But it also recalls both the patriotic messages and “red, white and blue” smoke plumes that are daubed across the sky on 4 July.
Delivered by a method usually used to advertise car sales or insurance, In Plain Sight brings to mind the work of other artists who have harnessed the language of advertising, but does so in a uniquely 21st century fashion; it’s not just a shareable, photogenic action, but one that has an “impact team” – led by the organiser, Set Hernandez Rongkilyo – working to ensure the message lingers. In this way, the artists behind In Plain Sight hope to push the viewer’s experience of the artwork beyond contemplation and into direct action.
“Oftentimes this speculative space that exists between an artwork and its reception by the viewer is filled with the hope that something generative is experienced by the viewer,” esparza explains, saying the artists wanted to “make something that can be of service to organisations that have been seeking justice for immigrant folks in detention for decades”.
Sky-typing may appear, upon first glance, to be an ephemeral mode of performance (albeit one that can reach around 3 million people with each message), but the work will live on via the free Augmented Reality app 4th Wall: users will be able to see the messages floating in the sky above key locations they visit.
The hashtag #XMAP directs viewers to the accompanying website, xmap.us, allowing viewers intrigued by the heavenly messages to see, via geolocation, the detention facilities in their town. They will also be able to donate to local bond funds and engage with the 17 immigrant justice organisations involved – such as ACLU Southern California, RAICES, and Freedom for Immigrants – and their work being done on the ground.
The coalition of activists and artists involved is nearly as jaw dropping as the scale of the work, including former minister of culture for the Black Panther party, Emory Douglas, the Cree artist Kent Monkman, the conceptual artist Mary Kelly, the writer and performance artist ALOK Vaid-Menon and the revolutionary artist Dread Scott.
The Aboriginal Australian cross-disciplinary artist and writer SJ Norman contributed the message “NO SUCH PLACE” (the literal meaning of “utopia”), which appeared over the Laredo detention center in Texas. “When Indigenous peoples speak the names of our nations we are frequently told, implicitly or explicitly, there’s no such place,” Norman said in the artist’s statement. “The maintenance of the colonial project is contingent on atrocity and the perpetration of atrocity is largely contingent on denial. Settlers live with the ancestrally coded fear of losing what they know they stole in the first place.”
Indeed, many Australians who shared the In Plain Sight images on social media were quick to note Australia’s significant rates of Aboriginal deaths in custody, incarceration and immigration detention – such as the former Manus Island detainees now being held in Melbourne’s Mantra Hotel – and how the inhumanity of such policies is magnified by the Covid-19 crisis.
The artists hope that as the messages fade from the sky, they will inspire in viewers a desire to bring about change. “We knew it was ephemeral, but the quickness [with] which the wind erased the cloud really for me spoke to the moment we’re in currently,” Cassils says. “We have a brief moment of clarity – with Covid, with uprisings, there’s momentum that’s building – but we must act now, we must be relentless, we cannot give up.”
The final fleets of planes will head to the skies in the coming weeks. Above the Statue of Liberty, where Emma Lazarus’s inscribed sonnet – “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” – came to symbolise the hopefulness of immigration to the US, Dread Scott’s message will float in the sky. It will read “Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia”, the name of the first immigrant to die in US detention from Covid-19.