Cycle 01
Materiality of Air / Right to Breathe

Cycle Support

• Generously supported by a Virtual International Collaboration Project grant from the Netherlands.

The inaugural iteration of Atmospheric Entanglements is enacted through a collaboration between students in the Critical Inquiry Lab at the Design Academy Eindhoven (NL), and the BFA program at Jindal School of Liberal Arts & Humanities (IN), supported by a Virtual International Collaboration Project grant from the Netherlands. The theme of this inaugural collaboration, “The Materiality of Air / The Right to Breathe,” is inspired by Achille Mbembe’s observation that real and ongoing geographical historical differences, nonetheless do not foreclose on the universality of the ‘Right to Breathe’. A simple slogan that encapsulates an important and complex intersection: the social, notably from the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police in the US and the painful cry heard across the world ‘I can’t breathe’, and air pollution tethered to political economy and Capitalist forms of life. Together, we’ll inhabit this intersection that ‘Air’ opens up from the indiscipline of artistic and research-based design. Whilst foregrounding situated and field-based research, we’ll be emphasising trans-scalar, and trans-regional reflections, since the medium of ‘air’ is uncontainable by geographical territory – in other words, air is both local and non-local, that is, atmospheric.

Cycle Team

• Achia Anzi

• Arun Kumar HG

• Kris Dittel

• Patricia Reed

• Payal Arya

• Priyesh Gothwal

• Susanta Mandal

• Saskia van Stein

Cycle Interlocutors

• Caitlin Berrigan

• Dr. Sneha Krishnan

• Nerea Calvillo

• Nicholas Shapiro

• Nicole L'Huillier

• Niroj Satpathy

• Patricia Reed

• Ravi Agarwal

• Sewali Deka

• Sri Shankar Sharma

• Zahra Malkani

Bibliographic Inspiration

•  

  Gabriel O. Apata

  ‘I Can’t Breathe’: The Suffocating Nature of Racism

  2020

•  

  Achille Mbembe

  The Universal Right to Breathe:
  Colonialism & the Ethics Of Memory

  Lecture

  2020

•  

  Nerea Calvillo

  Aeropolis:
  Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds

  2023

•  

  Desiree Foerster

  Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes

  2021

•  

  Sachit Mahajan Jennifer Gabrys Joanne Armitage

  AirKit: A Citizen-Sensing Toolkit for Monitoring Air Quality

  2021

•  

  Dipesh Chakrabarty

  The Climate of History in a Planetary Age

  Lecture & Panel Discussion

  2021

•  

  Sasha Engelmann Sophie Dyer Lizzie Malcolm Daniel Powers

  Open-weather:
  Speculative-feminist propositions for planetary images in an era of climate crisis

  2022

•  

  Eva Horn

  The Case of Air

  2022