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

Josephine Taylor (bio)

A review of 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 and register. For Albano, the piece emphasizes the biological function of breathing while exploring breath as a shared commonality. Throughout the book, Albano articulates breathing as inviting a sense of intersubjectivity and thus an embodied ethics. Breath, although appearing an automatic process, is subject to emotional states: the individual’s interaction with their surrounding atmospheres can dictate space to breathe or a suffocation, where breath is restricted.

It is in this vein in which Albano determines breath as a site of autonomy, choice, and self-determination. As she articulates, “breath or its suppression is invoked as a protest against injustice, while freedom of breathing coincides with claims of civic and political liberties” (8). It is through breathing we experience not only individuality but also commonality, and thus to breathe unencumbered by restriction is a political struggle for justice and of autonomy. Breathing for Albano is also an entanglement with otherness and thus invites an other-centred ethics, one that begins not just with the self but with an inherent interdependency. Towards the end of the first chapter, Albano refers to the project Life of Breath, an interdisciplinary work that addresses “the interrelation of breathing and breathlessness in terms of illness and well-being” (15). Paying attention to the change of rhythms in breathing, the ways breathlessness creates a fracture in being, the cultural project itself attends to the ways the body is dependent on air, and how much of the sufferer’s pain is invisible. For Albano, this problem of visibility extends not just to individual health but also to other forms of breathlessness where ecologies, politics, and violence put breathing at risk. Breath is a site of health and well-being, but it is interrelated with structural and environmental conditions. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s claim of the “universal right to breathe,” Albano illuminates how access to clean air, to strive for an autonomy in breathing, is dictated by a social as well as racial stratification of air.

The film Death by Pollution (2021) explores the social justice fight of the mother of Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, whose death was ruled a result of air pollution by a South London coroner. The film focuses on the mother’s plight to make clean air a human right and the ways clean air becomes geographically stratified in urban landscapes across racial lines. Contending with the politics of air and the environmental racism that underscores access to breathable and green space, the film highlights the devastating effects of uneven access to clean air in urban demographics. In the chapter “Ecologies of Breathing,” Albano draws on decolonial theorist Christina Sharpe to consider how atmospheres are imbued with social and racial prejudice. As Albano notes, “the atmosphere becomes the foreboding sign of lethal climates of abuse” (27). Breathlessness marks an encroachment on autonomy and individuality in which, as Albano argues, “breathlessness remains a form of control and coercion” (74). In light of Christina Sharpes’s analysis of the suffocating legacies of slavery, Albano recalls George Floyd’s statement in which he repeated twenty-seven times “I can’t breathe.” In such violent abuses of air, Albano notes that the breath “is as much a cry for justice and equality as a call for safe air—in the various entangled meanings that safe air can signify—and an end to political and ecological violence” (71). In such a reading, the politics of air and breath comes to signify a liberation movement focused on which lives are given room to breathe and who faces violent forms of restriction and suffocation. In the politics of air, in which black lives are faced with the violence of breathlessness to police brutality to environmental racism, Albano recalls an intimation of Frantz Fanon’s “zones of non-being”—”since it stands both for a denial of the ontological link to life represented by breath and a disavowal of the epistemological significance that the breath carries as a definer of subjectivity and commonality” (74-75). Air becomes a space of combat, reflecting the violent legacies of racism and histories of slavery which shape black subjectivity. As breathing becomes an arena targeted and weaponized from tear gas to physical restraint, Albano reflects on the significance of the universal right to breathe in the face of the violent structural racism that shapes the politics of air. Echoing Black Lives Matter protests, Albano’s work urges that we consider how air is weaponized against black lives.

Albano concludes her reflections on vulnerability, encroachment, restriction, and representation of air through Anaïs Duplan’s reworking of a Giorgio Moroder song, “You Take My Breath Away: A Sonics of Freedom” (2020). The piece is distorted and layered with sounds of coughing and gasping in which one feels “sonically engulfed in breathlessness” (79). In this song, distinct voices emerge that ask: “Can I pursue liberation? What kind of liberation can I pursue?” It is here that Albano observes how resistance emerges through art, where the song emphasizes breathing as a layered duality. Its invitation for commonality and shared interdependency emerges from the autonomy and shared nature of breath. Albano’s analysis implicates the significance of art in rendering visible breath’s release and its suffocation, the ways in which we are dependent on environments, atmospheres, and politics to breathe easy. It is a poignant reflection on our shared common immersion in air and its layered history, often shaped by structural conditions of inequality.

Albano’s work invites eco-criticism as a field to consider air as a significant component to be read through arts and culture. As the humanities seek to understand the ways culture is shaped by nonhuman components from energy to soil to water, Albano’s work is unique in its approach to considering how air is central to not only our biological lives but also the social, cultural, and political. Albano considers how breath shapes our lives and the ways art and culture render its significance visible. She also maintains an urgent focus on the ways that air is weaponized and transformed into toxic airwaves. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, where a specific focus on air and how we breathe became all the more urgent, Albano provides an important intervention into exploring the politics and cultural life of air.

Josephine Taylor is Postdoctoral Fellow in Energy Narratives and Coastal Communities at University College Dublin. Her research is in environmental humanities and she is currently working on her first monograph on Nonhuman Narratives of Energy, contracted with Palgrave Animal and Literature Series. She has published in the areas of science fiction, petroculture, gender and affect theory. She is also a member of the research collective Beyond Gender, which carries out joint projects focused on queer and feminist science fiction.

Works Cited

• Death by Pollution. Black and Brown Productions, 2021.
• Mbembe, Achille. “The Universal Right to Breathe.” Translated by Carolyn Shread, Critical Inquiry, vol. 47, no. S2, 2021.