Cultural Reflections on an Embodied Life of Breath: A review of Caterina Albano, Out of Breath: Vulnerability of Air in Contemporary Art

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• Cultural Reflections on an Embodied Life of BreathA review of Caterina Albano, Out of Breath: Vulnerability of Air in Contemporary Art
• Josephine Taylor (bio)

Albano, Caterina. Out of Breath: Vulnerability of Air in Contemporary Art. U of Minnesota P, 2022.

The Wellcome Collection's exhibit in 2022, In the Air, emphasizes how the act of breathing, our common immersion in air, is a problem of politics, justice, and culture. Revealing the ways that air can be weaponized, and focusing on breathlessness as a site of racial political struggle, In the Air contends with how art and cultural work render visible air's stratification and the invisible pollutants that shape our atmosphere. Caterina Albano's Out of Breath: Vulnerability of Air in Contemporary Art opens with a similar premise, arguing for cultural and artistic responses to the significance of breath as a site creativity, life, and struggle. Writing during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time in which the air we breathe, and breathlessness, becomes all the more urgent, she explores the "intrinsic relation of life to air and breathing" (ix). Albano views art as a key site to critique and challenge today's atmosphere of breathing and her analysis interweaves explorations of specific art works with an emphasis on the commonality yet individual nature of breathing. Considering the encroachment on breath, Albano's work is an important intervention in the ways that art and culture think through the problem of air toxicity, as well as an examination into the philosophical implications of an embodied ethics of breathing.

Albano's contribution to the field of environmental humanities is to consider air from a cultural and social lens, and how artistic and creative work can contribute to and unpack the centrality and importance of clean airwaves to our physical and mental livelihoods. Just as branches of environmental humanities such as the blue humanities, energy humanities, and now the soil humanities begin to grow in importance and significance, does Albano's work help us consider another central aspect of our ecology through the lens of culture? This work invites us to ask if air has been left outside the critical lens of the field of environmental humanities. Achille Mbembe's "The Universal Right to Breathe," for instance, requires us to consider the racial significance and politics of breath in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, demanding a sense of urgency to consider the politics of airwaves. Research centres such as the Wellcome Trust alongside Bristol and Durham University also held an exhibition on the Life of Breath asking similar questions of the role of air in our lives beyond the medical and physical arenas. What is unique in Albano's approach is her interdisciplinary scope, considering air from the perspective of Mbeme as a domain that is racially and socially stratified, but simultaneously an area of philosophical inquiry, a cultural and artistic inspiration, and a way of understanding metaphysics. What is at stake is to consider how art and culture, and the tools of a theoretical understanding of air, can contribute as well as demand change to the urgent topic of air pollution and toxicity.

Drawing on the philosopher Luce Irigaray, Albano highlights how an air-bound state is fundamental to being in the world: "we are because we breathe" (10). For Albano, breathing is a process of entanglement that involves exchange and individual action, immersing us in our environment while also integral to our individuality as a singular being. Her opening chapter, "To Breathe," thinks through the ontological nature of breath, how breath is what brings us into being, while simultaneously being dependent on the surrounding atmosphere. As Albano suggests, "to be in the world is to breathe, and life depends on the exchange between respiration and the gaseous environment that surrounds human and nonhuman living beings" (5). Thinking through the ways we render breath visible, its release and exchange, Albano explores the installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Last Breath (2012). It is an installation designed to store an individual's breath, made of a small brown paper bag which inflates and deflates, capturing the presence of a person's breath through mechanics of the machine, its sound...