Counter-attacking Pollution in Three Aerial Acts

ABSTRACT

Air pollution is one of the most significant factors to confront when making connections between ecological crisis and globalization. Smog is caused by the burning of fossil fuels and the accumulation of pollutants in the troposphere or lower atmosphere. Dangerous gas emissions contribute to global warming, which in turn creates conditions to produce lung-damaging ‘ground-level ozone’. Thus, there is a direct and cyclical correlation between grounded corporeality or embodiment and the aerial. Achille Mbembe has carefully reflected on human subjectivity and an ecologically damaged planet united by the Covid-19 pandemic. It is in that spirit of agency that this article analyses three cultural experiments that investigate and interrogate atmospheric relations within the Capitalocene, an epoch in which humans and non-humans cannot be dissociated from the scalar ramifications of industrial consumerism.A theoretical framework for thinking about the performativity of polluted air can potentially be found within new materialism, a contemporary discourse in search of a practical philosophy for turbulent times. Roberdeau argues that the three artistic, sociological and architectural case studies that follow extend these practical and theoretical observations to the elusive but nevertheless real or specific materiality of the air itself in local populated zones, investigating the economic, geopolitical and anthropogenic effects on the earth’s atmosphere and, therefore, on everyday life in those communities.