'John Kinsella, at an online event at the University of Warwick (November 2020), spoke of his hands-on work creating and maintaining firebreaks, and planting trees. [...]it was the fire that caught my imagination. What interests me is the rupture in a dialogue that changes, in a professional or public context, from an equal exchange of words to the forced, shared witness of personal discomfort elevated to spectacular pain; and which bodies are turned by grief into a thing for a pedestal, not a thing to be tidied away. Suddenly I had a swooping vision of many years' and two hemispheres' worth of incarcerated people: migrants trapped on small islands in Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, the Pacific; detention centres in the neighbourhood of business-and-holiday British airports; crippled poor relations languishing in small rooms in the Caribbean and Latin America, where the state assumes 'the family' looks after its own.' (Publication abstract)
