Dervish In Progress

LAYERED JOURNEYS, LAYERED HUMANITY

Over the past decade, air travel has not only transformed modes of transportation, service models, and consumption habits; it has also made the social, economic, and psychological positioning of contemporary human beings more visible. Airports, aircraft, waiting lounges, security lines, and transit corridors are no longer neutral spaces of movement. They have become living laboratories in which the inequalities, time regimes, class divisions, and behavioral aesthetics of the modern world are placed on display. Travel today is no longer simply about going from one place to another; it has become a readable sign of one’s position within the system.

Bodies heading toward the same sky no longer share the same experience on the ground. On one side are those moving through softened systems of privilege: fast-track passages, private lounges, priority services, and protected zones of waiting. On the other side are large crowds traveling under intensified pressure, fatigue, uncertainty, and time scarcity, within a model that appears democratic on the surface but in fact compresses stress and vulnerability into the journey itself. These two forms of movement do not simply produce different ticket categories; they also produce different gestures, different levels of patience, different bodily rhythms, and different modes of public presence.

This can be imagined through a metaphor: two groups of people standing on a horizontal line that represents life itself. On one side, a smaller minority that appears more composed, more cultivated, more controlled, and more protected by status. On the other, a much larger majority moving under greater pressure, greater exposure, and greater exhaustion, and therefore appearing more defensive, more strained, more abrupt, or more worn. What is visible on the surface, however, is not essence. It is form. It is the shape that conditions take in the body.

The eye that looks only at the surface judges too quickly. Those who appear more refined are often read as more civilized, more measured, more self-controlled. Those who appear harsher or less polished are often treated as if they were simply less developed. But the surface reveals only the outcome, not the process that produced it. The real reading begins beneath the line.

If that line is understood as a cross-section, then below it lie the layers that shape human appearance and behavior: history, class, education, culture, deprivation, privilege, emotional injury, protection, exclusion, family inheritance, political pressure, and intergenerational memory. Under every visible form of calm or tension lies an accumulation. What looks like courtesy may be the social expression of having had space, rest, recognition, and protection. What looks like roughness may be the bodily language of compression, insecurity, surveillance, and prolonged exposure to pressure.

For this reason, public behavior cannot be reduced to individual character alone. What appears as elegance or hostility, patience or impatience, softness or defensiveness, is often the visible result of unequally distributed life conditions. Comfort tends to soften gesture. Pressure tends to harden it. Security allows for patience. Vulnerability often shortens the distance between tension and reaction.

Airports make this reality easier to observe because they condense social life into a single choreography: walking speed, tone of voice, queue behavior, reactions to delay, treatment of workers, management of personal space, and tolerance for uncertainty. What appears there is not merely travel behavior, but a miniature social map of humanity itself.

And yet the deeper truth is this: no surface state is final. A person who appears polished may carry buried layers of fear, violence, fragility, or inherited domination. A person who appears rough may carry unused sensitivity, intelligence, aesthetic depth, or simply a humanity that has not been given enough protection to remain visibly gentle. Human beings are not fixed conditions; they are layered processes. Their visible form is only the latest surface of a long becoming.

This is why a more ethical way of reading people is needed. Not one that classifies human beings according to how refined or unrefined they appear, but one that asks what conditions, histories, and pressures have shaped that appearance. The point is not to romanticize harshness or glorify refinement. It is to understand that every visible form has a history beneath it.

Surface separates. Depth explains.
Surface classifies. Depth connects.
Surface judges. Depth understands.

To truly understand a human being is not to ask how polished, defensive, civilized, or worn they appear today, but to ask through which layers they have been formed.

ZIYA AZAZI
March 27th, 2026 / Vienna Airport

DERVISH IN PROGRESS DIP Bulgaria DIP-TEP Members DIP-MADRID Annual Workshop Dervish in Progress: Workshop mit Ziya Azazi in Zürich