Breathless
de Ala Roushan
"The book BREATHLESS shares contributions on the paradoxes of air, atmosphere and the breath with key texts and artworks. Immersed in the smog of our current predicament, philosopher Dehlia Hannah proposes a new vocabulary for air in her text, "Inversion Layer". Following the flow of air, Flaka Haliti's installation "Speculating on the Blue" opens a portal to an artificial atmosphere, demarcating a sensorial experience that defines boundaries of a closed reality. Connecting to other parallel worlds, philosopher Achille Mbembe's "The Universal Right to Breathe" captures the complexity of a thickened planetary atmosphere with a global perspective on the urgency of the breath, offering direction to alternative trajectories beyond suffocation. Marguerite Humeau's speculative sculptures that have survived suffocation imagine a species that has evolved exclusively to breath. Charles Stankievech exhumes the voices of Clarice Lispector and Lygia Clark as an interconnected mystical encounter in a text titled "Breath With Me, A Breath of Life". In "Twilight of Sighs", psychoanalyst and philosopher Alireza Taheri analyzes a sigh with a set of poetic propositions. With the same intensity, Donna Kukama re-narrates history with her performance "Chapter Q: Dem Short-Short-Falls" as she breathes the memory of an invisible event. Invisibility of viral and virtual particles are positioned in the context of other times in history in Ala Roushan's text "Air of Our Closed World", articulating the inversion experienced today within the domestic bubble/bunker. "The Air Without" by Kate Whiteway connects illness and metaphor to consider the paradoxical air that both oxygenates the lung and the air that breathes diamond dust. With a granularity greater than dust, Heather Davis's text "Molecular Intimacy" situates us at the nanoscale to grasp bodies and the atmosphere they breathe. This final text loops back to the start of the book in considering the air of our contemporary sky and the breath that exists in its precarious state. Under this arched sky, the book ends with "Fire with Fire", engulfed in the smoky aftermath of forest fires in the work of Julius von Bismarck."--