What is Liminal?

Airports exist in the strange unsettling category of non-space. We pass through like ghosts, our identities reduced to a series of flights, gates and boarding group numbers, as we’re passed from security checkpoint to checkpoint. Surrounded but alone, inexplicably drinking a bloody mary at 2pm, we silently say goodbye to those we’ve already left, waiting for our next adventure to begin.

Along with dark stairwells, playgrounds at night, and rooftops at early dawn, airports are spaces of circulation and transition, suspended from time, existing solely as a threshold between what came before and what comes after.

This is liminality: the strange twilight zone of ambiguity and paradox during a rite of passage to something new.

Liminality is disorienting because it means detaching from the parts of your identity that feel familiar. But there is a genuine form of liberation in this anonymity. It’s an opportunity for a birds-eye view of our existing social hierarchies and traditions, for building new customs and institutions, for growth & transformation. It is the feeling of floating before becoming.

We invite you to celebrate with us at Liminal: a spring campout for Straylight and our friends at Kinone Pension, one of the last rebellious houses still standing between a taxiway and tarmac at Narita Airport. The farmers who continue to grow vegetables on the site of Narita Airport first had to fight for their land in the 1960s, when the Japanese government announced it would build there. While some sold their land, many like the co-operative owners of Kinone Pension resisted, and a protest movement was born when leftist students took on the cause.

We hope you’ll join us for this overnight camping event, with two days of community, music, talks and creative self-expression, as we reflect together on what came before, and what can come after.

Thank you

We're so excited to see you there.