What the Walled Off Hotel Reveals About Our Liquid Times

Banksy, Bauman, Sontag and the Architecture of Fear by Frazer Macdonald Hay

In Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Zygmunt Bauman describes a world slipping from solid certainties into fluid insecurities, a world where social bonds thin, trust evaporates, and fear becomes a political resource more valuable than truth. We inhabit, he argues, an age shaped by negative globalisation: a system that grants radical freedom of movement to some while confining others behind walls, checkpoints, and bureaucratic cages.

Standing in Bethlehem, Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel, with its famous “worst view in the world”, is perhaps one of the clearest architectural embodiments of these liquid conditions. It is an installation, a critique, a tourist attraction, and a brand; discomforting and oddly comfortable at the same time. Bauman would have recognised this paradox instantly: a site where global mobility and local immobility collide.

Yet to understand what it means to look at this hotel, we must also bring in Susan Sontag, whose Regarding the Pain of Others interrogates the ethics of witnessing suffering. If Bauman explains the conditions that produce a place like this, Sontag interrogates the morality of seeing it.

Together, they offer a powerful reading of what the Walled Off Hotel actually represents in our age of fear, distraction, and liquid memory.

Fear as Architecture

Bauman insisted that modern fear is rarely tied to real danger. More often, it is managed, circulated, ambient, an atmosphere used to justify enclosure, policing, and segregation. The wall in Bethlehem is fear cast in concrete: a physical manifestation of the belief that one population must be kept safe from another.

But fear is unevenly distributed. To visitors, the wall is an object to contemplate, a dramatic backdrop to a hotel stay. To local Palestinians, it is a daily constraint shaping everything from work to family life. The hotel spotlights this imbalance but relies on it too.

This is precisely what Bauman meant by negative globalisation: a world where some glide across borders while others live inside architectures of immobilisation.

Seeing Suffering: Sontag’s Challenge

What kind of “looking” is this?

Is it attention, or is it sightseeing?

She would worry that the hotel risks transforming the suffering of Palestinians into a spectacle for visitors, a curated encounter, an aesthetic experience, a performance of empathy.

As Sontag reminds us, we may think we are responding ethically when, in fact, we are responding aesthetically.

Negative Globalisation and the Tourism of Ruins

Bauman’s globalisation is not borderless; it is bifurcated. Some move freely; others cannot move at all. The Walled Off Hotel literalises this truth. To stay there is to be reminded that mobility is one of the great privileges of the modern age.

This intersects with a growing trend Sontag would recognise: the tourism of troubles, a mode of travel in which conflict zones become objects of fascination. Visitors come not only to “see” injustice but to experience the ambience of it, as if bearing witness were an end in itself.

Bauman would call this a symptom of liquid modernity; Sontag would call it a symptom of an exhausted, image-saturated conscience.

Neither would consider it harmless.

Being Out of Touch Together

Bauman famously described contemporary life as a state of being “out of touch together”, connected digitally yet emotionally disembedded. The Walled Off Hotel plays directly into this dynamic. Images of the wall flood social media: a brutal architecture of control becomes an Instagram backdrop, a curated moment.

Sontag would recognise this instantly. She warned that repeated encounters with images of pain can numb rather than mobilise. What begins as shock becomes familiarity; what begins as empathy becomes performance.

Together, Bauman and Sontag reveal how the Walled Off Hotel sits within a global economy of distracted witnessing, where outrage is fleeting, gestures replace commitments, and looking replaces acting.

Stylised Pain and the Aesthetics of Critique

Banksy’s playful, ironic visual language creates a profound dilemma. It critiques violence through humour, familiarity, and cleverness. Sontag argued that anything which makes violence “interesting” or “beautiful” can inadvertently soften its brutality.

In her view:

To aestheticise suffering is to make it remote.

This does not mean Banksy’s critique is invalid, only that it operates within a dangerous tension. By framing the wall through art, the hotel may unintentionally turn injustice into a consumable signal of awareness. Bauman, likewise, would see in this the logic of liquid modernity: dissent packaged safely for global circulation.

The Illusion of Witnessing

Sontag’s most persistent warning is that visibility is not understanding, and understanding is not solidarity. The Walled Off Hotel offers a vantage point, but a vantage point is not a reality. Visitors witness the wall but not the bureaucratic and political system that sustains it. They see the architecture of enclosure without living the conditions it enforces.

The danger, Sontag would insist, is that people leave believing they have “understood” something because they have looked at it.

Bauman would add that this is the liquid condition par excellence: profound awareness with minimal consequence

The Dangerous Classes

Bauman wrote about “dangerous classes,” groups portrayed as threats to social order. In many political contexts, Palestinians are framed this way, constructed as a permanent security problem. The wall is a visual narrative of this fear. The hotel exposes it, but only partially; it reveals the mechanism without dismantling it.

Guests remain safe observers, protected by passports and privilege. The dangerous class remains the dangerous class, even as the wall becomes an attraction.

A Symbol of Our Desperation?

Banksy’s hotel is both an indictment and a symptom. It reveals the absurdity of a world where walls multiply while our capacities for solidarity seem to shrink. It critiques global fear structures yet exists comfortably within global tourism networks. It mourns a lack of freedom yet thrives in an economy of curated dissent.

Bauman might call it a melancholy monument to liquid modernity.

Sontag might call it a troubling theatre of spectatorship.

Both would agree that it reflects our era’s deepest anxieties:

our distraction, our fear of the other, our loss of durable social bonds, and our increasing reliance on images, rather than relationships or action, to make sense of injustice.

Have We Become a Society of Distractions?

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that we have. We scroll instead of engage, react instead of organise, and witness instead of intervene. Banksy’s hotel stands at this crossroads: part warning, part spectacle, part memorial, part joke. It offers a view of the consequences of fear, but also reveals how easily such fear can be aestheticised, consumed, and forgotten.

Perhaps this is its real achievement: not that it helps resolves the tensions of our age, but that it holds them together long enough for us to look at them, uncomfortably, imperfectly, and without the consolations of easy answers.

Bauman shows us the systems that produce the wall.

Sontag shows us the ethics of looking at it.

Banksy shows us the absurdity of living with it.

What we do with that view remains entirely up to us.

#Bauman #LiquidModernity #LiquidTimes #SusanSontag #RegardingThePainOfOthers #Banksy #WalledOffHotel

#ArchitectureOfFear #MemoryAndViolence #ConflictArchitecture #BorderWalls #EthicsOfLooking #NegativeGlobalisation #ArchitectureAndMemory #UrbanViolence #EverydaySpaces #BuiltEnvironment #AdaptiveReuse #CulturalHeritage #Palestine #Bethlehem #SeparationBarrier #FreedomOfMovement #HumanRights #ConflictStudies #Peacebuilding #PoliticalArt #ArtAndActivism #AestheticizedViolence #VisualPolitics #TourismOfTrouble #Spectatorship #SociologyOfFear #TrustAndSocialBonds #GlobalInequality #Othering #EthicsOfWitnessing #SpectacleAndSociety #uniformnovember