Breathing commons: Affective and somatic relations between self and others

Abstract

This paper reports on our ongoing research focusing on cultivating and exploring the topic of what we refer to as breathing commons. We approach breathing as an affective and somatic bodily function that ties the individual with the collective, and through that aim to foster affective commoning among bodies. We present two workshops, one physical and one online, that we have ran amongst our research group on breathing commons. Three themes emerged from the analysis of the workshop activities: a) The body as a membrane, b) feelings of intimacy, vulnerability and awkwardness, and c) mutual engagement and care. These show a path towards engaging with breathing, and potentially with other bodily functions and biodata, aiming to open up the design space of doing affective commoning through bodily functions that act as a connection between bodies – both human and non-human. INTRODUCTION Breathing is a vital bodily function, experienced as the individual somatic practice of inhaling and exhaling. But breathing is also shared and social, which our current times, with prevailing themes such as Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement, greatly illustrate. The events connected to the latter, recently demonstrated to the world that the right to breathe is not equal for all but is linked to the skin colour and social and economic status: The words “I can’t breathe” have painfully become one of the most characterizing sentences of our time, chanted by millions of demonstrators during the global George Floyd protests in 2020. At the same time, in this Covid-19 pandemic, we wear face masks and keep social distance to our fellow citizens in order to prevent our exhalation to mix with another person’s inhalation. Breathing is that which keeps us alive, but also something that can potentially spread and contract airborne diseases; breathing folds exterior and interior, living and dying. These examples show how breathing has increasingly been becoming political, scaling from individuals to society, and vice versa. Our work aims to open up the design space of exploring breathing in interaction design (e.g. Prpa et al., 2020; Ståhl et al., 2016) as an affective and somatic bodily function that ties individual with intersubjective experiences, which we have articulated as breathing commons. We draw on Singh (2017), who uses Caffentzis and Federici’s (2014) notion of commons as the practices for sharing the resources we produce in an egalitarian manner, but also as a commitment to the