Iman Tajik, Under One Sky (2020)

composite image of sky

Iman Tajik, Under One Sky (2020)

“Wherever you are in the world, we are all under one sky

Iman Tajik is a Glasgow based artist and photographer originally from Iran. Borders and the movement of freedom are his key subject matters – influenced by his personal experience of crossing borders. He was working with us over the summer on a mass worldwide border-free walking project.

The Coronavirus pandemic has adopted an increasing fear of the outsider into our lives and homes. Some of our politicians’ rhetoric about Covid-19 being a ‘foreign virus’; subsequent border closures – they all play into existing xenophobia. The virus however, doesn’t acknowledge borders. A pandemic affected us all. So, what can we do to show that we all live under one sky?

Iman Tajik explored global solidarity through the reimagining of our annual Slow Marathon walking event. Instead of our annual place-based mass walk, this year’s Slow Marathon: Under One Sky took place collaboratively – by myriad participants around the globe. Cumulatively, mile by mile, we wended our human trail across the surface of our planet and through as many borders as we could. To do this, Iman forged a digitally collaborative relationship with many walkers, exploring the ideological interplay/conflict of borders and the virus; the lines we humans create traversing the landscape when free to do so; and the plight of those being denied that freedom – by the virus or by socio-political means. For this he collected images from walkers of the sky they saw while walking, to be brought together in a massive artwork of all of us Under One Sky.

The Under One Sky project and its event, Slow Marathon 2020 supported Scottish Detainee Visitors, who provide friendship and advocacy for residents of Dungavel House, Scotland’s only immigration detention centre.

In total, the Under One Sky project included 320 global walkers, who walked 41,725.46km – that’s 104.12% of the way around the Earth!” [credit]