Insurgent envelopment: The emergency blanket and scenes of exposure at border zones

Abstract

Critical engagement with spaces of exposure is an important research agenda in the contemporary social sciences and humanities. Developing and extending this agenda, this paper offers an account of how scenes of exposure at border zones are mediated materially, aesthetically, and politically by forms of envelopment. Specifically, it discusses the geographies of exposure and envelopment that unfold through the use and re‐use of the emergency blanket at these zones. Fabricated from metallised polymer films, emergency blankets are used commonly to provide thermal protection for bodies at risk of exposure in a range of situations. More than functional, however, these objects also have a distinctive aesthetic allure. By attending to the material and aesthetic qualities of the emergency blanket, this paper explores its visibility and significance in scenes of exposure at border zones. Highlighting how the blanket is deployed as a device of minimal comfort, the paper then considers artistic works that repurpose this object as part of a creative critique of conditions at these zones. Drawing on the work of Stacy Alaimo and Ronak Kapadia, among others, the paper develops the concept of insurgent envelopment to understand how artists use the emergency blanket in works that simultaneously foreground, disrupt, and reimagine relations between exposure and envelopment.