2. Ecologies of Breathing

To Make Air Visible

Preoccupations with the quality of air and its effects on wellbeing have a long history; foul air was believed to be a cause of ill health and a carrier of contagion from antiquity to the late eighteenth century. Since the mid-nineteenth century, however, our relationship with air has been increasingly endangered by man-made pollution. In Britain, for instance, sanitary and public health acts were first promulgated in the 1860s and continued well into the first decades of the twentieth century in an attempt to control industrial emissions. These were followed in 1956 by the Clean Air Act that introduced smoke-control areas and prohibited the emission of dark smoke from chimneys; this was further revised in 1968, till the promulgation of the European Community directive against pollution became effective in 1971.4 Since 2008, legislation in the European Community around clean air has been increasingly merged into single directives and the implementation of policies for the exchange of information and data on air quality.5 Despite these attempts to temper air pollution, its level has increased exponentially around the world and is regarded today as a major health threat, with an estimated 8.7 million deaths a year from exposure to air pollutants.6 However, as Rebecca Solnit argues, not only is the estimated number critical, but “how invisible those deaths are, how accepted, how unquestioned.”7 Air monitoring includes the measurement of gases (sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and ozone) and of polluting particles (from 10 microns to less than 2.5 microns in diameter). Fine particles are especially dangerous to health because, once inhaled, micropollutants, both for their size and chemical composition, trigger widespread inflammatory processes whose long-term effects are damaging to all organs in the body.8 According to a review in February 2019 by the Environmental Committee of the Forum of International Respiratory Societies, vulnerability to air pollution is “made worse by health inequality and environmental injustice”9 that have increased through social factors such as poor housing and diet that render certain groups more vulnerable than others: “Although air pollution affects people of all regions, ages, and social and economic groups,”10 individuals on low income and ethnic minorities living in segregated areas are more likely to be exposed to high levels of pollution. The same can be said for people living in regions of the Middle East, India, Asia, and Africa—where environmental issues intersect long-lasting conflicts. The authors of the review conclude,

Reducing vulnerability across a population calls for reducing poverty, segregation, and health-damaging neighbourhood environmental factors as well as reducing the ambient level of pollutants. Strategies to achieve health equality for vulnerable communities requires societal commitment of resources as well as the promulgation of air quality control measures.11

This vulnerability accords with what Franco Bifo Berardi refers to as a pervading state of physical and psychological breathlessness where pollution and also unequal distribution of resources and fear of violence converge, implicating air toxicity with economics and politics.12 These entanglements are inscribed within “a historical-political terrain formed both by environmental forces and by social cleavages, local ecologies and global vectors of power and capital, and, crucially, by the frictions and relations established among them.”13 Clearly, power and social and racial inequalities affect the distribution of ecological factors, calling into question issues of visibility and agency concerning air pollutants and responses to risks. “In this sense,” Paulo Tavares remarks, “situations of ‘environmental-social emergency’ [ . . . ] are always, at least potentially, intrinsically political, insofar as the coagulation of these diffused forces may threaten established regimes of power inasmuch as they put the life of marginalized populations on the edges of survival.”14

Such issues, in their specific local manifestations, are at the core of diverse projects by artists, architects, and designers aimed at raising public awareness about air pollution. These include Dust Plan (2015) by Chinese performance artist Brother Nut, who addressed Beijing’s polluted air over a period of three months by hoovering up air-polluting particles from the city’s streets with an industrial vacuum clear and making a brick from the dust. In Nuage Verte (2008), the artist duo Hehe (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen) used a green laser beam to illuminate the emissions cloud released by a power plant in Helsinki;15 one could see the size of the cloud changing in relation to the energy consumption of local residents. In Domestic Catastrophe Nº3: La Planète Laboratoire (2012),16 the same artists conveyed the unstable circulation and flux of air pollution, whose boundaries, location, and intensity are susceptible to constant change and movement, by creating a model globe spinning on its axis in a small water tank, while a light pointing to the Northern Hemisphere irradiates fluorescent green gas that slowly expands around the spinning globe to the sound of operatic music. Hehe’s floating globe is an eerie evocation of the constant fusion and motion of emissions in the atmosphere, whose surreal beauty disguises the systemic contamination that affects our air-bound state. In bringing to bear aesthetics on air toxicity, these diverse artworks make visible our vulnerability to the hidden nature of air pollution. Visibility here does not refer uniquely to representation but to an embodied sensory recognition of a situation that is mostly accepted despite its long-term effects. Hence, these artistic practices do not present pollution as an event but rather as an ongoing process of intra-actions among different systems and environments bringing to the fore our shared responsibility through our daily actions and their implications.

In rendering pollution visible, these artists further present us with the ever-changing situation of air resulting from such variables and intervening factors as the impact of emissions on the ozone level and of social and economic conditions. Indeed, as architect Nerea Calvillo, whose long-standing project In the Air (2008–ongoing)17 examines air conditions in relation to the urban fabric, demographics, and transportation networks in cities as diverse as Madrid, Budapest, and Santiago, comments, “Making the levels of air pollution visible allows us to measure the inequalities of a city and to understand the complexities of the urban fabric and the shifting demographic. It enables us to understand our own cities differently, and to have a more critical understanding of the space we live in.”18 Such an understanding is central to challenging the unequal distribution of safe breathing caused by poor air quality but also to making tangible the inescapable entanglement between physicality and meaning that is manifest through its effects, whether as respiratory diseases or temporary feelings of choking and gasping for cleaner air. Artist Michael Pinsky, in collaboration with Cape Farewell Project (Climart), the Norwegian Institute of Air Research and AirLabs, has developed an immersive installation, Pollution Pods (2017), consisting of five geodesic domes that reproduce the air conditions in five different locations across the globe: Trautra in Norway, London, San Paolo, Delhi, and Beijing.19 The distinct quality of the air in each pod is perceptible as smell, level of toxicity, temperature, and humidity. The installation translates different living environments into a felt experience in which, through breathing, the visitor can grasp how air vulnerability affects people in affluent as well as less affluent parts of the world. In so doing, Pinsky’s installation points to the higher vulnerability of air toxicity in places like Delhi and San Paolo, where air pollution is also the result of histories of economic exploitation and marginalization that have marred their communities and ecosystems alike. Conflagrations and deforestation are concurrent causes of pollution together with the extraction and deployment of energy-producing fossil fuels, while bomb detonation and chemical warfare also emit noxious traces of contaminating fumes. Inherent in these overlapping forms of abuse and destruction of the atmosphere is fear itself as another matter that subverts the inherent relation of breath to life.

To Breathe: A Principle of Action

Forensic Architecture is a multidisciplinary research agency, including architects, artists, filmmakers, lawyers, software developers, and journalists based at Goldsmiths, University of London, that supports human rights groups and other agencies by using architectural methodologies to investigate ecological and human rights violations.20 In their video Cloud Studies (2020), Forensic Architecture navigates the collusion of political and economic powers, of ecology and human rights by presenting eight investigations that encompass airstrikes, the use of white phosphorous and the aerial spraying of herbicides in the Gaza Strip, the military use of chlorine gas in Syria, forest fires in Indonesia, methane spillage in an oil fracking facility in Argentina, and the deployment of tear gas to disperse demonstrations worldwide.21 While I shall discuss this work and some of the investigations it comprises in more detail in the following chapter, it is worth pointing out the deeper implications of air toxicity by drawing on Forensic Architecture’s study of lethal clouds and the critical understanding it offers.

“Mobilized by state and corporate powers”—remarks the voiceover in Cloud Studies—“toxic clouds colonize the air we breathe across different scales and durations, from urban squares to continents and from incidences to epochal latencies.”22 Evanescent and unstable clouds form, move, change, and dissipate in the atmosphere leaving polluting traces. Only the data extrapolated from such traces substantiate their lingering presence in the atmosphere, “shifting the relationship between data points from linear to relational.”23 This is the case, for instance, in the deforestation by fire in Kalimantan, Indonesia, in 2015 that released a large cloud of carbon monoxide that drifted north and westward affecting other areas in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, before reaching the northern parts of Thailand and Vietnam, causing an estimate of more than one hundred thousand premature deaths.24 Cloud Studies juxtaposes the visualization of the cloud’s drift with that of other toxic emissions caused by chemical weapons and tear gas in places as diverse as Argentina, Egypt, and Hong Kong, associatively inflecting what can be regarded as “a cross-border condition of suffocation.”25 Not unlike Christina Sharpe’s notion of the weather in the wake of slavery as total environments imbued with racial prejudice and violence,26 the atmosphere becomes the foreboding sign of lethal climates of abuse. Clouds are thus the referent for the “porousness of global borders and the corruptibility of air.”27 Cloud Studies acts as a contemporary atlas translating the historical painterly attempt to capture the transience of clouds into digital maps of toxicity that visualize the “non-linear and multi-causal logic”28 governing the lingering and drifting of lethal air particles. Such a logic of causation is difficult to document, and the work of Forensic Architecture is characterized by both persistence and resistance in its attempt to move across different scales of cloud formation and toxic latency. Indeed, “today’s toxic fog breeds lethal doubt, and clouds shift once more from the physical to the epistemological. When naysayers operate across the spectrum to deny the facts of climate change just as they do of chemical strikes, those inhabiting the clouds must find new ways of resistance.”29 Resistance—as Sharpe argues in relation to racial violence, and we shall return to her argument in the last chapter—involves the breath as aspiration, as a forceful inhalation that creatively counteracts suffocation.30

Following Jacques Rancière, an ethics of breathing emerges within this context as a principle of action. Rancière traces the etymology of ethics to the ancient Greek word ethos, which, before referring to a norm, signified both “the dwelling and the way of being, or lifestyle, that corresponds to this dwelling. Ethics, then,” he continues, “is the kind of thinking in which an identity is established between an environment, a way of being and a principle of action.”31 If our way of being is through breathing in physical and other terms, as Irigaray suggests, vulnerability to toxic air undermines this correspondence between dwelling and a way of being by interfering with the very association between breathing and life, disrupting the physical and figurative rhythm that the breath establishes individually and collectively by threatening the cadence of life itself. Such insecurity toward the gaseous environment that supports life generates fears and anxieties that instead upset an ontological state of being. To use Rancière’s term,32 the indistinction—the blurring of boundaries between life enhancement and risk, safety and fear—mobilizes ethics as a principle of action vis-à-vis vulnerability to air toxicity by engaging with the contingency and meaning that breathing activates both individually and collectively within environments that are affected by endemic histories of war, migration, marginalization and deprivation as much as by chemical pollutants. In this sense, as Jane Bennett suggests, “ethical responsibility resides in one’s response to the assemblages in which one finds oneself participating,”33 corroborating the centrality of ethical responsibility in the intra-actions of knowing, being, and doing. Matter itself, according to Michel Serres, has become “gaseous,” “more airlike than liquid, more informational than material. The global is fleeing towards the fragile, the weightless, the living, the breathing.”34 In this shift resides for Serres the possibility of forms of understanding that can take into account the connections across time (past, present and future), places and scales in which we are implicated with others, both human and nonhuman, “living things and resonating things,” which also “receive, transmit, store and process information.”35 An awareness of such relationships requires the recognition that “we exist within a whole natural system that is connected but its language has yet to be understood.”36 Attention, awareness and listening are thus key to what we can refer to, with Irigaray, as a “being-there” and “being-with.” This encompasses the transience and continuity of life itself as well as the habitat in which we live—a way of being, in other words, that exceeds the narrow parameters of individual existence. Here, as Serres reminds us, the body “is not only for itself, it carries in itself for those that follow as well” through its genetic makeup that guarantees continuity across generations and temporalities.37 Environments and habitats are also locations for which “we have to assume the responsibility of maintaining a merely temporary habitat, quite common to everyone across space and time, in order to pass it on to successors as habitable and beautiful as we received it from our predecessors” without soiling or appropriating it through contamination and violence; “we must live, in some way, at the same time there and outside the there, between here and elsewhere,” in a continuation of time and space, “in the symbolic and the concrete, the second receiving meaning from the first.”38 Air and breath articulate the fluidity and entanglements argued by Serre where past and future are indissociable from the present, and where there is continuity between here and elsewhere, us and others (in all their forms), meanings and matter.39 Softness is the quality of this connectivity that for Serres has to be paired with an attitude of care toward the environment and the information that pervades it. This also entails a reassessment of knowledge and its ethics: “We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions”—in Serres’s words—“without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously.”40 Emotion and affect are part of knowledge and action; they partake of modes of understanding whereby the effort of protecting the atmosphere also becomes one of critically acknowledging how the gaseous legacy of air implicates the contingency of its systemic contamination by the circulation of ideological as much as physical pollutants and pathogens. Information and critical understanding of the material and emotional consequences of vulnerability to air toxicity contribute to reframing contamination vis-à-vis forms of knowledge and doing that encompass being as breathing and its experiential as well as figurative meanings.

“Running Out of Breath”

The Sars-CoV-2 pandemic has brought such issues to the fore, drawing attention not only to the correlation of air pollution and viral contamination but also to the complex intersecting of knowledge and doing around safe breathing. In his historical overview of pandemics from the H1N1 Spanish Flu viral infection in 1918 to the outbreak of Sars-CoV-2,41 Mark Honigsbaum underlines the role of environmental, immunological, economic, social, and cultural factors to the spreading of viral infections.42 Deforestation and the expansion of farm land often result in the alteration of ecological habitats that facilitates the proximity of vectors of infection—such as bats—with livestock and humans, thus leading to potential contagion. Global trade and travel accelerate the spread of infectious diseases exponentially, while urbanization and more generally high-density demography together with high pollution levels and scarce sanitation further exacerbate viral transmission. The current climate crisis and pandemic are, in fact, “interfaced aspects, on different scales of time and space, of what is now chronic emergency.”43 Presumed to be linked to the Hunan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, a Chinese city of 11 million inhabitants, in which wild animal meat was also sold, “Covid-19 struck a world that”—in Honigsbaum’s words—“had never been more interconnected setting off a chain of infections that crashed world stock markets, grounded international aviation, and silenced the most advanced cities in the world.”44 An airborne virus that can be contracted through direct or indirect contact, Covid-19 affects the respiratory system causing fever and dry cough, sore throat and bodily aches.45 The picture Honigsbaum draws about the insurgence and spread of SARS-CoV-2—a new coronavirus—in December 2019 and the early months of 2020 is also one of political negligence and slow responses from local and national authorities worldwide, of reduced resources for healthcare and international research funding for the development of vaccines for coronavirus-related infections.46 Early warnings of the potential danger of a new pandemic from veterinary ecologists monitoring animal habits, from the World Health Organization and related monitoring programs such as ProMed were also systematically ignored.47 In this volatile environment the entanglement of matter and meaning emphasizes more than ever the communality and singularity of each breath at the emergence of knowing, acting, and being.

At present, the state of Rancière’s indistinction has figuratively choked the close environments of economics and geopolitics. The invisible matter of a virus—nothing more than a protein molecule that, by mutating the host cell, causes disease—has exposed the precarious interdependency of body politics (i.e., governments and health, social, and cultural institutions) and bodily needs as the essential condition for safe breathing and good health. The proximity and distancing that Irigaray recognizes as inherent in breathing has acquired a new ethical urgency as we practice social distancing and are reminded of the porous boundaries between our safety and that of others, the individual and communal relations of responsibility and coexistence.48 In this climate, the spread of anxiety overlapping with viral contagion as fear is also part of the momentous encounter with our living environments affecting personal securities and public safety. Meanwhile, we continue breathing; ventilators and breathing protection masks have become nationwide issues of life and death, while oxygen shortages have put unprecedented pressure on health systems in Latin America (especially in Perù, Brazil, and Mexico), and in Asian and African countries, including India, Pakistan, Iran, and South Africa, with concerns in Laos, Nigeria, Malawi, and Zimbabwe.49 Access to breathing-support equipment, oxygen, and vaccination has sharpened the divides among those who are vulnerable across and within national borders. Everyone is reliant on safe breathing, yet we are increasingly confronted with the fragile interdependence of politics, economics, and well-being. Hence, the entanglement of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the climate emergency are evidenced not only in the insurgence and spread of the infection but also in the ways in which it has been tackled. According to economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, “Vaccinating the world will be crucial if countries are going to act together to confront the climate crisis, which will require many of the same things as delivering vaccines: resources, innovation, ingenuity and true partnership between rich and developing countries.”50 Access to vaccine is, however, still unequal: at the end of April 2021 “less than 2% of the population of Africa has been vaccinated, while 40% of the population in the US and 20% of the population in Europe had received at least one dose.”51 Such disparity reflects the ingrained matrixes of power as well as the potential for change that the pandemic has brought to the fore. With Covid-19, a systemic mutation is occurring within the political and social cells of nation-states: economies are at risk and governments themselves panic at the levels of contagion. Suffocation makes its oppressive pressure tangible.

In an article published in The New York Times in April 2020 and reprinted in the collection of essays under the title, Azadi (2020), Arundhati Roy considers the responses to the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 infection in the United States and India, as both countries were struggling with its severity.52 Roy underlines the historical rupture the pandemic has brought about and signals the opening of a portal between the recent past and postpandemic future. In her view, the danger is to seek a return to “normality”—to gravitate by default toward the past—rather than embracing the opportunity to imagine a different future. Roy’s invitation for change resonates with Achille Mbembé’s declaration for “the universal right to breathe” which was also published in April 2020.53 According to Mbembé, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought us back to the body, to its physicality and mortality, to what it means to be a body that lives together with other bodies (including viruses) as part of ecosystems.54 In Mbembé’s words, “There is no doubt that the skies are closing in. Caught in the stranglehold of injustice and inequality, much of humanity is threatened by a great chokehold as the sense that our world is in a state of reprieve spreads far and wide,” while there is also the potential for a break from the past and the possibility of radically reimagining a future of equality and justice for the community, or what he calls “the in common.”55 Breath as “the universal right to breathe” stands as both a bodily process and metaphor for such a state of being “in-common” and for life itself. Mbembé does not exclude the danger of the continuation of current geopolitics of exclusion, exploitation, and dominance, of what he refers to as “wars on life” that, not unlike SARS-CoV-2, suffocate, “taking the breath away”—whether in terms of the pillaging of resources and environments, or of social, racial, and other forms of inequality and injustice. He also postulates the breath as a catalyst for rupture and renovation.

Before this virus, humanity was already threatened with suffocation. If war there must be, it cannot so much be against a specific virus as against everything that condemns the majority of humankind to a premature cessation of breathing, everything that fundamentally attacks the respiratory tract, everything that, in the long reign of capitalism, has constrained entire segments of the world population, entire races, to a difficult, panting breath and life of oppression. To come through this constriction would mean that we conceive of breathing beyond its purely biological aspect, and instead as that which we hold in-common, that which, by definition, eludes all calculation. By which I mean, the universal right to breathe.56

Mbembé’s return to the body resonates with Serres’s and Irigaray’s embodied ethics whereby physicality stands as the inherent condition of life, of being “in-common” in a web of inter- and intrarelations that each breath generates. But the body is also mortal and fragile; it is the body that suffocates. The matrix of power relations that governs the socioecological systems and the geopolitical climate in which SARS-CoV-2 has emerged and proliferates is one of breathlessness: one that confronts us with an epistemic running out of breath with historicity. To put it another way, the prevailing suffocation and breathlessness underpinning contemporary toxic atmospheres—whether due to pollution, pillage, extractivism, or violence—underlines the shortcomings of established practices of knowledge and understanding as well as of politics and economics. A preservation of the gaseous legacy of the atmosphere meets Mbembé’s injunction of the universal right to breathe as an aspiration—to borrow from Sharpe—for clear air and for what clear air stands for: freedom, justice, and equality. Issues of visibility are ever more present, as is the sense of urgency that characterizes the gasping for air.