Expo 2020

Back from a let’s-say-unusual few weeks in Dubai. I was meant to give a big talk there – dignitaries/excellencies etc, etiquette-expanding stuff – but contracted this dread virus instead and for a while entertained visions of wheezing my intubated, asthmatic last many hours away from home. Happily the vaccines did their job and while isolation was grim, my symptoms were entirely weedy. Nonetheless, now I’m recovered, I elected to head home ASAP for hopefully understandable reasons, so had to withdraw from the event.

I was able to squeeze in a quick visit to Expo 2020, however. It deserves caveats. Yes, it’s teeming with cheesy robots and sweeping popsci generalisations about AI. Yes, its primary function is soft power and reputation laundering, although the queues outside the Belarus pavilion were noticeably short. But I still found it interesting, even touching. There’s something compelling and tbh just cool about bringing the world together to talk about futures – and also to do it in a creative, artistic, architectural, and cultural way that engages the public.

This is the kind of thing modern-era Britain finds deeply uncomfortable, I think. Excluding the flag-shagger fringe, national earnestness pokes uncomfortably against our forcefields, the barriers of cynicism we construct so we don’t have to look each other in the eye and confess our dreams. The only time fervent belonging ever really worked for us was 2012, and that was only thanks to home advantage.

But it has not escaped my attention that I’m an earnest dude and so, yeah: I enjoyed it. High-frequency grins behind the face mask, lots of mindless photos. Even the mediocre drone shows had some charm, although I drew the line at the ‘smart police station’.

It was also a fascinating toe-dip into other cultures. I’m not likely to see musical performance from subregions of Pakistan, nor a Saudi mass-unison song – swords aloft, dramatic lighting and everything – in my everyday life. I suppose new experience is the point of travel anyway.

Osaka 2025 is a long way off temporally and spatially but, you know, I’m tempted.