Notes
Preface
Extract from Saadi’s Gulistan, 1259 AD, Shiraz, Iran. These verses were included in the press release for Hossein Valamanesh’s Breath, 2013, bronze, http://www.roseissa.com/past%20exhib/Hossein/Hossein-exh1.html.
Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013), 91.
1. To Breathe
Raphael Lozano-Hemmer, Last Breath (2012), multimedia installation and video, https://www.lozano-hemmer.com/last_breath.php. The installation is complemented by a video that shows Oliveros exhaling in the paper bag. Another breath captured is that of the Cuban singer Omara Portuondo. Lozano-Hemmer has intentionally selected artists whose creative practice involves breathing.
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 3.
Lenart Škof and Petri Berndston “Introduction,” in Atmospheres of Breathing, ed. Lenart Škof and Petri Berndston, i–xxvii (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), ix–x.
Škof and Berndston, xi.
Škof and Berndston, xv.
John Durham Peters, “The Media of Breathing,” in Atmospheres of Breathing, ed. Škof and Berndston 179–95.
Petri Berndston, “The Possibility of a New Respiratory Ontology,” in Atmospheres of Breathing, ed. Škof and Petri Berndston, 25–50.
Tim Ingold, “The Atmosphere,” in Chiasmi International, 14 (2012): 75–87 at 77.
Ingold, 76–77.
Ingold, 80–81.
Marijn Nieuwenhuis, “Atmospheric Governance: Gassing as Law for the Protection and Killing of Life,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36, no. 1 (2018): 78–95 at 79. See also Marijn Nieuwenhuis, “Breathing Materiality: Aerial Violence at a Time of Atmospheric Politics,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 9, no. 3 (2016): 499–521; https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2016.1199420; Peter Sloterdijck, Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: semiotext(e), 2009), 9–10.
María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 1–17.
Puig de la Bellacasa, 5.
Samuel Beckett, Breath, in Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Shorter Plays (1969; London: Faber & Faber, 2009), 79. Artist Damien Hirst has realized a video installation based on Beckett’s play, Breath (2001), in which the camera spans over a heap of medical debris and technical equipment, lingering over an ashtray and an empty bottle at the end, as we hear a long sighing exhalation.
Beckett wrote Breath for Kenneth Tynan’s theater revue, Oh! Calcutta! He relates the short play to a citation by Ausone de Chancel. In his words, “I realized when too late to repent that it is not unconnected with On entre, on crie / Et c’est la vie. / On crie, on sort, / Et c’est la mort,” quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 565.
Steven Connor, The Matter of Air: Science and the Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion Books, 2010); Peter Adey, Air: Nature and Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2014); Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell (1943; Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications, 1988).
Tim Ingold, “Footprints through the Weather-World: Walking, Breathing, Knowing,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16, supplement (2010): S121–39.
Arthur H. Ewing, “The Hindu Conception of the Functions of Breath—A Study in Early Hindu Psycho-Physics,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 22 (1901): 249–308.
Patanjali, The Yoga Sutras of Pantajali, trans. and commentary Sri Swami Satchidananda (circa 300 AD; Buckingham, Va.: Integral Yoga Publications, 2013), book 2 verses 49–53, 148–53.
Abraham P. Bos, “‘PNEUMA’ As Quintessence of Aristotle’s Philosophy,” Hermes 141, no. 4 (2013): 417–34.
David Sedley, “Stoic Physics and Metaphysics,” in The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, ed. Keimpe Algra, Jonathan Barnes, Jaap Mansfield, Malcolm Schofield, 353–411 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 388.
Katrin Klingan, Ashkam Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol, Bernd M. Scherer, eds., “Hippocrates—Breaths,” in Textures of the Anthropocene: Vapor (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press: 2014), 31–34.
Alice Malpass et al., “Disrupted Breath, Songlines of Breathlessness: An Interdisciplinary Response,” British Medical Journal—Med Humanities 45 (2019): 294–303 at 298.
Jean-William Fitting, “From Breathing to Respiration,” Respiration: International Review of Thoracic Diseases 89, no. 1 (2014): 82–87 at 83.
Fitting, 85–86.
Fitting, 86.
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Human Emotions in Man and Animals, with an Introduction, Afterword, and Commentary by Paul Elkman (1872; London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1999), 41–42.
For a discussion of Qi in Chinese philosophy, see Jana S. Rošker, “The Concept of Qi in Chinese Philosophy: A Vital Force of Cosmic and Human Breath,” in Atmospheres of Breathing, ed. Škof and Berndtson, 127–40.
Reinhild Draegher-Muenke and Maximillian Muenke, “The Healing Energy of Breath in Traditional Chinese Medicine,” in Functional Respiratory Disorders, ed. Ran D. Anbar, 301–23 (Totowa, N.J.: Brand Humana Press, 2012).
Havi Carel, “Invisible Suffering: The Experience of Breathlessness,” in Atmospheres of Breathing, ed. Škof and Berndtson, 233–45 at 233–34.
Luce Irigaray “The Age of Breath,” in Luce Irigaray: Key Writings, 165–70 (London: Continuum, 2004), 165.
Luce Irigaray, “From The Forgetting of Air to To Be Two,” trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluáček, in Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger, ed. Nancy J. Holland and Patricia Huntington, 309–15 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 310. See also Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, trans. Mary Beth Mader (London: The Athlone Press, 1999).
Irigaray, “From The Forgetting of Air to To Be Two,” 311–12.
Irigaray, 312. See also Luce Irigaray, “To Begin with Breathing Anew,” in Breathing with Luce Irigaray, ed. Lenart Škof and Emily A. Holmes, 217–26 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); and Lenart Škof and Emily A. Holmes, “Towards Breathing with Luce Irigaray,” in Breathing with Luce Irigaray, ed. Škof and Holmes, 1–14; Lenart Škof, Breath of Proximity: Intersubjectivity, Ethics, and Peace—Sophia Studies in Cross Cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015); Magdalena Górska, Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability (Linköping: Linköping University, 2016).
See Carel, “Invisible Suffering,” 236–40. Carel examines the isolation felt by patients suffering from pathological breathlessness from a phenomenological perspective.
Kate Elswit, Megan Nicely, Ben Gimpert, Breath Catalogue (2015–18), https://www.breathcatalogue.org/. See also Kate Elswit, “A Living Cabinet of Breath Curiosities: Somatics, Bio-media, and the Archive,” International Journal of Performance and Art Media 15, no. 3 (2019): 340–59. I am indebted to Elswit’s article for my reading of this work.
Elswit, “A Living Cabinet of Breath Curiosities,” 340.
Elswit, 340.
Elswit, 351.
Elswit, 350.
Elswit, 352.
Elswit, 351.
Elswit, 344.
Malpass et al., “Disrupted Breath,” 294. Elswit also refers to this project in her article, see Elswit, 345–47.
Carel, “Invisible Suffering,” 234–35.
Carel, 237.
Carel, 237–38.
Malpass et al., “Disrupted Breath,” 297. See also Carel, “Invisible Suffering,” 238–40.
Óscar Muñoz, Breath (1996–2000), silkscreen on metal mirrors, https://moisdelaphoto.com/en/artistes/oscar-munoz/.
Caroline Menezes, “Óscar Muñoz: The Presence of the Absence” (2008), https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/oscar-munoz-the-presence-of-the-absence.
2. Ecologies of Breathing
Amy Balkin, Public Smog (2004), http://tomorrowmorning.net/publicsmog.
Balkin, Public Smog.
Balkin, Public Smog. See also T. J. Demos, Decolonising Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 106–12.
http://www.air-quality.org.uk/02.php. For the history of legislation on air pollution in the United Kingdom, see Mark Whitehead, State, Science, and the Skies: Governmentalities of the British Atmosphere (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
See Directive 2008/50/EU, and Directive 2011/850/EU, https://ec.europa.eu/environment/air/quality/existing_leg.htm. For further European Union regulations on Eon air pollution see https://www.loc.gov/law/help/air-pollution/eu.php. In the United States emission regulations followed a similar though slightly delayed trajectory. For a discussion of the Clean Air Act in the United States, see Beth Gardiner, Choked: The Age of Air Pollution and the Fight for a Cleaner Air (London: Granta, 2019), 145–68. See also Paulo Tavares, “Stratoshield,” in Textures of the Anthropocene: Vapor, ed. Katrin Klingan, Ashkan Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol, and Bernd M. Scherer, 61–71 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014), 68–71.
Oliver Milman, “‘Invisible Killer’: Fossil Fuels Caused 8.7m Deaths Globally in 2018, Research Finds,” The Guardian, February 9, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/09/fossil-fuels-pollution-deaths-research. See also World Health Organization, Health Topics: “Air Pollution,” https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1.
Rebecca Solnit, “There’s Another Pandemic under Our Noses, and It Kills 8.7m People a Year,” The Guardian, April 2, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/02/coronavirus-pandemic-climate-crisis-air-pollution.
Dean E. Schaufragel et al., “Air Pollution and Noncommunicable Diseases: A Review by the Forum of International Respiratory Societies Environmental Committee, Part 1: The Damaging Effects of Air Pollution,” CHEST 155, no. 2 (2019): 409–16 at 411.
Schaufragel et al., 415.
Schaufragel et al., 414.
Schaufragel et al., 415.
Franco (Bifo) Berardi, Breathing: Chaos and Poetry (South Pasadena, Calif.: semiotext(e), 2018), 52. See also Beth Gardiner, “White Supremacy Goes Green: Why Is the Far Right Suddenly Paying Attention to Climate Change?” New York Times, February 28, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/opinion/sunday/far-right-climate-change.html.
Tavares, “Stratoshield,” 67.
Tavares, 67–68.
Hehe, Nuage vert (Green Cloud) (2008), http://hehe.org.free.fr/hehe/texte/nv/.
Hehe, Domestic Catastrophe Nº3: La Planète Laboratoire (Domestic Catastrophe Nº3: The Laboratory Planet) (2012), http://hehe.org.free.fr/hehe/planet/index.html.
Nerea Calvillo, In the Air (2008–ongoing), http://www.intheair.es/.
Nerea Calvillo in conversation with Rose Thompson, in Eco-Visionaries, exhibition catalogue (London: The Royal Academy of Arts, 2019), 84–92 at 92.
Michael Pinsky, Pollution Pods (2017), http://www.michaelpinsky.com/project/pollution-pods/.
Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (New York: Zone Books, 2017), 9.
Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies (2020), video, https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/cloudstudies.
Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies, voiceover.
Eleanor Zeichner, “The Examined Sky,” in Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies: Responses to the Cloud (2020), 1–3 at 1, https://art.uts.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/CloudStudies-Book-Final-Web.pdf.
Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies, voiceover.
Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies, voiceover.
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 104.
Zeichner, “The Examined Sky,” 1.
Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies, voiceover.
Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies, voiceover.
Sharpe, In the Wake, 113.
Jacques Rancière, “The Ethical Turn in Aesthetics and Politics,” in Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran, 109–32 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 110.
Rancière, 116.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 37.
Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. by Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 121.
Michel Serres, Biogea, trans. Randolph Burks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 196.
Mary Zournazi, “Cosmocracy: A Hymn for the World? Reflections on Michel Serres and the Natural World,” Journal of Interdisciplinary International Studies 9, no. 2 (2012): 1–9 at 6.
Serres, Biogea, 49.
Serres, 49–50.
Serres, 89–92.
Serres, 71.
For the naming of the virus see World Health Organization nomenclature practices, see https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/technical-guidance/naming-the-coronavirus-disease-(covid-2019)-and-the-virus-that-causes-it. Throughout I shall refer to SARS-CoV-2 pandemic using both the official name of the virus and the commonplace name of Covid-19.
Mark Honigsbaum, The Pandemic Century: A History of Global Contagion from Spanish Flu to Covid-19 (London: Penguin Books, 2020), xiii–xix.
Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso 2020), 113.
Honigsbaum, The Pandemic Century, 262.
For causes of transmission, see https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/transmission-of-sars-cov-2-implications-for-infection-prevention-precautions.
Honigsbaum, The Pandemic Century, 273.
Honigsbaum, 270–73.
For a consideration in terms of choreography of the interrelation of proximity and distancing brought about by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic through breath, see Kate Elswit, “Dancing with Our Coronasphere to Navigate the Pandemic,” Dance Magazine, July 21, 2020, https://www.dancemagazine.com/six-feet-distance.
Madlen Davies and Rosa Furneaux, “Oxygen Shortages Threaten ‘Total Collapse’ of Dozens of Health Systems,” The Guardian, May 25, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/may/25/oxygen-shortages-threaten-total-collapse-of-dozens-of-health-systems; Richard Pérez-Peña, “Why Some Hospitals Lack Oxygen to Keep Patients Alive,” The New York Times, May 4, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/may/25/oxygen-shortages-threaten-total-collapse-of-dozens-of-health-systems. Lack of oxygen supplies affects all patients needing respiratory support, not only Covid ones. Hospitals in poorer areas rely on oxygen tanks, which are more expensive, rather than being directly connected to supplies via pipes, thus being especially vulnerable to shortages.
Abhijt Banerjee and Esther Duflo, “If We Can Vaccinate the World, We Can Beat the Climate Crisis,” The Guardian, June 5, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/05/poorer-nations-climate-promises-vaccines-vaccinating-covid.
Banerjee and Duflo.
Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic Is a Portal,” in Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction (London: Penguin Random House, 2020), 204–14.
Achille Mbembé, “The Universal Right to Breathe,” trans. Carolyn Shread, Critical Inquiry, April 2020, https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/.
Mbembé.
Mbembé.
Mbembé.
3. Entanglements of Air
Shona Illingworth, Topologies of Air (2021), video and sound installation, https://thewappingproject.org/event/topologies-air-shona-illingworth/.
Shona Illingworth and Nick Grief, Airspace Tribunal (2018–ongoing), interdisciplinary forum http://airspacetribunal.org. The Airspace Tribunal is “a non-governmental tribunal set up by citizens—as such it challenges the traditional state centric view of how international law is created.” E-mail communication with the artist, March 6, 2012. See also Nick Grief, Shona Illingworth, Andrew Hoskins, and Martin A. Conway, “The Airspace Tribunal: Towards a New Human Right to Protect the Freedom to Exist without a Physical or Psychological Threat from Above,” Digital War (December 2020), doi: 10.1057/s42984-020-00023-w.
Nick Grief, “The Airspace Tribunal and the Case for a New Human Right to Protect the Freedom to Live without Physical or Psychological Threat from Above,” Digital War, October 12, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1057/s42984-020-00023-w; and Illingworth and Grief, Airspace Tribunal, http://airspacetribunal.org/.
Grief, “The Airspace Tribunal.”
Grief, “The Airspace Tribunal.”
Marijn Nieuwenhuis, “Atmospheric Governance: Gassing as Law for the Protection and Killing of Life,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36, no. 1 (2018): 78–95 at 80.
Grief, “The Airspace Tribunal.”
Catherine Loveday quoted in Grief, “The Airspace Tribunal.”
Loveday quoted in Grief, “The Airspace Tribunal.”
Loveday quoted in Grief, “The Airspace Tribunal.”
Gabriele Schwab, “The Airspace Tribunal,” The Power Plant, Toronto, November 4, 2020, author’s notes, https://www.thepowerplant.org/ProgramsEvents/Programs/Other-Programs/Airspace-Tribunal-(1).aspx.
Schwab, “The Airspace Tribunal,” author’s notes.
Schwab, “The Airspace Tribunal,” author’s notes. Schwab further referred to 2020 as “the year of breath,” alluding to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the debate around face masks, and the chokehold on George Floyd—issues on which I will focus in chapter 4.
Otolith Group, The Radiant (2012), High Definition video, 64 min. Founded in 2002 by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, Otolith Group is known for its critical interdisciplinary collaborative practice in projects and films that question the documentary form and engage with issues of futurity and transnationality. The Radiant is part of Otolith Group’s ongoing investigation of the Anthropocene. As Eshun comments, “The Anthropocene gives us a different frame to understand the relations between scientific processes—whether those are atmospheric or geological—and human time.” http://otolithgroup.org/index.php?m=project&id=143. For an account of the disaster, see Gabriele Schwab, Radioactive Ghosts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 179–82; and Lucy Birmingham and David McNeill, Strong in the Rain: Surviving Japan’s Earthquake, Tsunami, and Fukushima Nuclear Disaster (London: St. Martin’s Press, 2012).
Otolith Group, The Radiant.
Karen Barad, “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable,” in Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy, ed. Matthias Fritsch, Philippe Lynes, and David Wood, 206–48 (Bronx, N.Y.: Fordham University Press, 2018), 221. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt201mp8w.
Barad, 226.
Barad, 226–27.
Barad, 227.
Schwab, Radioactive Ghosts, 18–26.
Schwab, 26.
Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: semiotext(e), 2009), 105. See also Bruno Latour, “Air,” in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones, 105–7 (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2006).
T. J. Demos, Decolonising Nature, 253–55.
Demos, 249.
Barad, “Troubling Time/s,” 224–27.
Natsuko Akagawa, “‘Difficult Heritage,’ Silenced Witnesses: Disremembered Traumatic Memories, Narratives, and Emotions in Japan,” in Places of Traumatic Memory, ed. Amy L. Hubbell, Sol Rojas-Lizana, Natsuko Akawaga, Annie Pohlman, 37–59 (Basington, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 40.
David Fedman and Cary Karacas, quoted in Akagawa, “‘Difficult Heritage,’” 46.
Fedman and Karacas quoted in Akagawa, 46.
Akagawa, “‘Difficult Heritage,’” 46–47.
Barad, “Troubling Time/s,” 239.
Schwab, Radioactive Ghosts, 211.
Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 9. See also Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistic of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 2009); Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, trans. Linda Haverty Rugg (London: Granta, 2012).
Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 9–10.
Sloterdijk, 16.
Caterina Albano, “Forgotten Images and the Geopolitics of Memory: The Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–6),” Cultural History 9, no. 1 (2020): 72–92, doi: 10.3366/cult.2020.0209. Only in 1992 did the Italian government recognize responsibility for the use of chemical weapons. See Simone Belladonna, Gas in Ethiopia: I Crimini Rimossi dell’Italia Coloniale (Vicenza: Rizzoli, 2015), 25.
Lutz Becker, The Lion of Judah, War in Ethiopia 1935–1936 (1975), documentary film based on archival film footage, Imperial War Museum, Film Archive, London, MGH 2624.
Marijn Nieuwenhuis, “Atemwende, or How to Breathe Differently,” Dialogues in Human Geography 5, no. 1 (2015): 90–94 at 91.
Nieuwenhuis, 91.
Nieuwenhuis, 92.
Weizman, Forensic Architecture, 9.
Forensic Architecture, https://forensic-architecture.org/.
Forensic Architecture, Investigation Khan Sheikhoun I. 23, 2017, https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/chemical-attack-in-khan-sheikhoun; Investigation Al Lataminah I.41, 2017, https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/chemical-attacks-in-al-lataminah.
Forensic Architecture, Investigation Duoma, I. 34, 2018, https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/chemical-attacks-in-douma.
Weizman, Forensic Architecture, 52.
Weizman, 53.
Weizman, 30.
Weizman, 31.
Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies, 2020, video, voiceover, https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/cloudstudies.
Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies, voiceover.
Waat Al-Kateab and Edwards Watts, For Sama, 2019, documentary film, produced by Waat Al-Kateab, United States, United Kingdom, Syria.
Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies, voiceover.
Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies, voiceover.
Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies, voiceover. See also Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel (London: Verso, 2017), 304–5.
Pappe, Ten Myths about Israel, 161–62.
Forensic Architecture, Investigation Triple-Chaser, I. 43, 2018, https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/triple-chaser.
Forensic Architecture, Investigation Triple-Chaser, I. 43.
Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies, voiceover.
Forensic Architecture, Cloud Studies, over-script.
4. To Suffocate: The Politics of Breathing
Ai Weiwei, Mask, 2013, marble, https://www.lissongallery.com/exhibitions/ai-weiwei—3.
Maria Chehonadskih and Andrés Saenz De Sicilia, “Subject: The Global Distribution of the Ethical,” June 2020, https://works.raqsmediacollective.net/index.php/2020/06/08/31-days-june-2020/.
Mbembé, “The Universal Right to Breathe.”
Ai Weiwei, Mask Project, 2020, Press Release, Lisson Gallery, London, July 13, 2020, https://www.lissongallery.com/news/ai-weiwei-launches-art-project-to-raise-funds-for-covid-19-humanitarian-causes. Ai Weiwei also realized a film, Coronation (2020), on how the pandemic was handled in China.
Mark Brown, “Ai Weiwei Creates 10,000 Masks in Air of Coronavirus Charities,” The Guardian, May 28, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/may/28/ai-weiwei-creates-10000-masks-in-aid-of-coronavirus-charities.
Ai Weiwei, quoted in Brown, “Ai Weiwei Creates 10,000 Masks.”
Lauren Aratani, “How Did Face Masks Become a Political Issue in America?,” The Guardian, June 6, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/29/face-masks-us-politics-coronavirus; Benjamin Mueller, “After Months of Debate, England Requires Face Masks for Shoppers,” New York Times, July 14, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/world/europe/uk-coronavirus-masks-mandate.html; Graham P. Martin, Esmée Hanna, Margaret McCartney, and Robert Dingwall, “Science, Society, and Policy in the Face of Uncertainty: Reflections on the Debate around Face Coverings for the Public during COVID-19,” Critical Public Health, 30, no. 5 (2020): 501–8, https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2020.1797997; Helene-Mari van der Westhuizen et al., “Face Coverings for Covid-19: from Medical Intervention to Social Practice,” The British Medical Journal, August 19, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m3021.
Martin Pengelly, “US Sets World Record for Coronavirus Cases in 24 Hours,” The Guardian, October 31, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/us-world-record-coronavirus-cases-24-hours.
Westhuitzen et al. “Face Coverings for Covid-19”; Adam Burgess and Mitsutoshi Horii, “Risk, Ritual, and Health Responsibilisation: Japan’s ‘Safety Blanket’ of Surgical Face Mask-wearing,” Sociology of Health Illness 24, no. 8 (November 2012): 1184–98. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9566.2012.01466.x pmid: 22443378.
For an account of the medical experience in the first months of the pandemic in the United Kingdom, see Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic (London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2021).
Sarah Cascone, “Chinese Artist and Activist Brother Nut Is Taking a Vow of Silence to Protest Government Censorship of Coronavirus Data,” Artnet, July 21, 2020, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/brother-nut-silent-pandemic-protest-1896045. In chapter 2, we referred to Brother Nut’s 2015 project on air pollution.
Quoted in Jon Henley, Kate Connolly, Kim Willsher, and Daniel Boffey, “France May Follow Germany in Making Clinical Masks Mandatory,” The Guardian, January 20, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/20/france-may-follow-germany-in-making-clinical-masks-mandatory. Emphasis added.
In the UK, Boris Johnson’s rhetoric had deliberate military overtones that channeled his hero, Winston Churchill’s Second World War speeches with a similar attempt at mobilization and generating nationalist feeling.
“Infection,” Merrian-Webster Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/infection.
Havi Carel, Matthew Radcliff, and Tom Froese, “Reflecting on Experiences of Social Distancing,” The Lancet, 396 (10244), July 30, 2020, 87–88 at 88, doi: 10.1016/S0140–6736(20)31485–9. For an analysis of the complex relations between pathological breathlessness and feelings of safety, see Kate Binnie, Coreen McGuire, and Havi Carel, “Objects of Safety and Imprisonment: Breathless Patients’ Use of Medical Objects in Palliative Setting,” Journal of Material Culture, 26, no. 2 (2020), doi: 10.1177/1359183520931900.
Jamie Grieson, “Covid Death Rate in Prisons Three Times Higher than Outside,” The Guardian, March 16, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/16/covid-death-rate-in-prisons-three-times-higher-than-outside; Mary Van Beusekom, “Studies Detail Large COVID Outbreaks at US Prisons Jails,” CIDRAP, April 5, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/16/covid-death-rate-in-prisons-three-times-higher-than-outside; Beth Schwartzapfel, Katie Park, and Andrew Demillo, “1 in 5 Prisoners in the U.S. Has Had Covid-19,” The Marshall Project, December 18, 2020, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/12/18/1-in-5-prisoners-in-the-u-s-has-had-covid-19.
Daniel R. Morales and Sarah N. Ali, “Covid-19 and Disparities Affecting Ethnic Minorities,” The Lancet, April 30, 2021, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/12/18/1-in-5-prisoners-in-the-u-s-has-had-covid-19.
Mohammad S. Razai, Hadyn K. N. Kankam, Azeem Majeed, Aneez Esmail, David R. Williams, “Mitigating Ethnic Disparities in Covid-19 and Beyond,” British Medical Journal, January 14, 2021, https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.m4921.
Razai et al.
Simeng Wang, Xiabing Chen, Yong Li, Chloé Luu, Ran Yan, and Francesco Madrisotti, “‘I’m More Afraid of Racism than of the Virus!’: Racism Awareness and Resistance among Chinese Migrants and Their Descendants in France during the Covid-19 Pandemic,” European Societies 23, supplement (2020), S721–S742 at S723, doi: 10.1080/14616696.2020.1836384.
Arundhati Roy, “We Are Witnessing a Crime against Humanity,” The Guardian, April 28, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/28/crime-against-humanity-arundhati-roy-india-covid-catastrophe.
Roy.
Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (London: Penguin Books, 2017), 342–43.
Roy, “We Are Witnessing a Crime against Humanity.”
Roy.
Abhijt Banerjee and Esther Duflo, “If We Can Vaccinate the World, We Can Beat the Climate Crisis,” The Guardian, June 5, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/05/poorer-nations-climate-promises-vaccines-vaccinating-covid.
Michel Serres, Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr, with an introduction by Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 190–96.
Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 34–36.
Cemelesai Dakivali (Arsai), My Memory, 2017, engraving, Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, ZKM, 23.5.2020–8.8.2021, https://zkm.de/en/exhibition/2020/05/critical-zones.
“Encounters,” in Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics, exhibition cataglogue (Karlsruhe: Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, ZKM), 28.
“Encounters,” in Critical Zones, 28.
Michel Serres, Biogea, trans. Randolph Burks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 170.
Serres, 171–72.
Serres, 169–70.
Serres, 172.
Mbembé, “The Universal Right to Breathe.”
Arman (Armand Fernandez), Home, Sweet Home, 1960, gas masks, wooden box, and plexiglass, Centre Pompidou, Paris, https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/5BZeCMj.
Marijn Nieuwenhuis, “Atmospheric Governance,” 83. See also Miguel de Larrinaga, “(Non)-lethality and War: Tear Gas as a Weapon of Governmental Intervention,” Critical Studies on Terrorism, June 16, 2016, 522–40, https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2016.1197626.
Nieuwenhuis, “Atmospheric Governance,” 83.
Nieuwenhuis, 85.
Nieuwenhuis, 89.
Nieuwenhuis, 89.
Nieuwenhuis, 90.
Nieuwenhuis, 91.
Hiwa K., This Lemon Tastes of Apple, 2011, video performance, http://www.hiwak.net/projects/lemon-tastes/.
Hiwa K., “Performative Resonances: Hiwa K. in conversation with Anthony Downey and Amal Khalaf,” interview by Anthony Downey, Ibraaz, July 30, 2015, https://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/171.
Hiwa K., “Performative Resonances.”
Hiwa K., “Performative Resonances.”
Hiwa K., “Performative Resonances.”
Hiwa K., “Performative Resonances.”
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 10.
Butler, 11.
John Akomfrah, Handsworth Songs, 1986, film, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/black-audio-film-collective-handsworth-songs-t12862; see also British Film Institute http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/441093/index.html.
Quoted in Akomfrah, Handsworth Songs.
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 104.
Sharpe, 111.
Sharpe, 106.
Sharpe, 109.
Sharpe, 110. See also Franco (Bifo) Berardi, Breathing: Chaos and Poetry (South Pasadena Calif.: semiotext(e), 2018), 15; and “Eric Garner: NY Officer in ‘I Can’t Breathe’ Death Fired,” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-49399302.
Sharpe, In the Wake, 111–13.
Jerome Roos, “From New York to Greece, We Revolt ’Cus We Can’t Breathe,’” ROAR Magazine, December 7, 2014, https://roarmag.org/essays/eric-garner-protests-we-cant-breathe/.
Kenya Evelyn, “FBI Investigates Death of Black Man after Footage Shows Officer Kneeling on his Neck,” The Guardian, May 27, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/26/george-floyd-killing-police-video-fbi-investigation.
Elsa Dorlin, Se défendre: Une philopsophie de la violence (Paris: Zones Éditions Le Découverte: 2017), 17.
Dorlin, 175.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; London: Pluto Press, 1967), 2.
Sharpe, In the Wake, 113.
Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” Transversal Text, September 2011, https://transversal.at/transversal/1011/butler/en.
Sharpe, In the Wake, 113.
Marijn Nieuwenhuis, “A Right to Breathe,” Critical Legal Thinking, January 19, 2015, https://criticallegalthinking.com/2015/01/19/right-breathe/.
Nieuwenhuis, “A Right to Breathe.”
Nieuwenhuis, “A Right to Breathe.”
Nieuwenhuis, “A Right to Breathe.”
Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” in Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, 12–27 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016).
Amnesty International, “USA: Law Enforcement Violated Black Lives Matter Protesters’ Human Rights, Documents Acts of Police Violence and Excessive Force,” August 4, 2020, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/08/usa-law-enforcement-violated-black-lives-matter-protesters-human-rights/.
Amnesty International, “USA: Law Enforcement Violated Black Lives Matter Protesters’ Human Rights.”
Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” 15.
Gabriele Schwab, Radioactive Ghosts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 211.
Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” 25.
Butler, 26.
Butler, 13.
Sharpe, In the Wake, 113.
Mbembé, “The Universal Right to Breathe.”
Anaïs Duplan, You Take My Breath Away: A Sonics Freedom, 2020, voice and sound, https://parrhesiades.com/Ana%C3%AFsDuplan.html.
Duplan, You Take My Breath Away.
Will Harris “What Kind of Liberation?,” 2020, https://parrhesiades.com/Ana%C3%AFsDuplan.html.
Duplan, You Take My Breath Away.
Duplan, You Take My Breath Away.
Duplan, You Take My Breath Away.
Duplan, You Take My Breath Away.