On Air and in Breath

Abstract

Paying attention to the material interconnections between humans and the more-than-human world calls for innovative modes of sensing, knowing and being. This essay activates works that explore the affective and corporeal potential of atmospheric materialities as these link bodies into expanded fields of intra-active resonances (Barad 2007) through breath and ‘con-spiracy’ –breathing together (Choy 2016). In particular, I explore Saraceno's On Air (2018a), Ashley Fure's The Force of Things: An opera for objects (2017) and Chantal Bilodeau's theatre play Sila (2014). These works offer immersive experiences that demand situated material practices that emerge from sensorial ways of being in the world with others. As such, they bring forth corporeal affective intimacy and attentiveness to the ongoing world of others in relation. By building airy architectures from the stuff of vibration, sound, and particulate matter, these works stimulate entangled, affective, and performative environmental ethics, that invite novel forms of embodied human and non-human kinship, collective grief, and even hope.