Towards a sensory politics of the Anthropocene: Exploring activist-artistic approaches to politicizing air pollution

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate five activist-artistic approaches to argue for a sensory politics of the Anthropocene. Our aim is to highlight the affective and speculative potentials of art by examining how artists engage with the senses to make air pollution and its political implications visible, tangible, or otherwise experiential. The paper touches on widerreaching discourses on the politics of sensing, sensible politics, and sensory studies. Rather than situating air pollution within a policy framework, such as that of the international sustainable development goals, we locate our arguments within recent scholarship on postpolitics and the Anthropocene. Despite its epistemological slipperiness, we consider the Anthropocene to be a potent heuristic as well as a rich resource of ideas, data, and collaborative and antagonistic potential for artists working on issues of air pollution. The five case studies are each grounded in an explicit engagement with at least one of the five basic senses and include works by Amy Balkin, Hanna Husberg, Zane Cerpina and Stahl Stenslie, Lingling Zhang, Kitchen Budapest and Baltan Laboratories (NL). Clustered into three lines of argumentation, we demonstrate the ways in which these works contribute to the politicization of air: first, by framing air as a contested common good that problematizes the commodification of clean air; second, by integrating artistic research and environmental communication strategies; and third, by providing sensory experiences of the complicated constellations of agency and perception in the interscalar phenomenon of air pollution. Although our analysis is not exhaustive, three particularities could be identified in the works: an openness to other forms of knowledge and communication; a potent critique of the Anthropocene; and a radical questioning of ‘the political’. In conclusion, we argue that art can mobilize a sense of urgency and empowerment towards a multi-sensory politics of the Anthropocene.

Listening-with the subaltern: Anthropocene, Pluriverse and more-than-human agency

“…Indeed, art can foreground the emergence of "alien agency" (Salter & Pickering 2015), generating instances of ontological theatre that provide clues on how to address the challenges of our current zeitgeist, combining politics, affect and aesthetics. For example, Landau and Toland (2021) argued that political action is stimulated when the senses are galvanized through artistic engagement. Moreover, within non-representational theory (Thrift 2004) there has been increased concern with the articulations of ethics and aesthetics, often turning to the arts and the sensate (Harrison 2000) to identify "new modes of ethical and aesthetic inhabitation" (McCormack 2002: 473).…”

Just air? Spatial injustice and the politicisation of air pollution

“…These investigations into making the invisible visible are often linked to an interrogation of the different forms of knowledge production and dissemination involved in grasping and politically translating the air, or in the words of Landau and Toland (2021), how different kinds of knowledge, including affective knowledges, are interwoven into ‘curated experiences of air pollution’. Nicola da Schio and Bas van Heur (2021) have taken this question of the politics of knowledge production as the core focus of their contribution.…”

“…First, almost all contributions address in one way or the other the issue of how to render the invisible visible and the untangible tangible, so that air’s social entanglements and injustices can be experienced. Dealing most directly with this topic, Friederike Landau and Alexandra Toland (2021) describe five activist art projects on the atmosphere, which, in a similar vein as the PigeonBlog project, aim at making the air, its ‘inscribed’ injustices and political implications experiential or sense-ible . Exploring the way the five senses are constitutive in each of the artist activist projects, Landau and Toland (2021) highlight air’s affective and speculative potentials.…”

“…Maltby's (2021) contribution, on the other hand, highlights the importance of scale, showing how knowledge and problem brokers have connected differently to policy makers at the scale of London and the scale of the UK, shaping different political fields for the construction of air pollution policies. Landau and Toland (2021) also draw attention to scale in their article, underlining the need to 'demystify and deconstruct scale by evoking the senses', with the aim 'to create new feelings of agency in those affected ' (p. 11).…”

A Platform for Art: Infrastructural Citizenship Beyond Monumentality in Toronto’s Transit Art

“…Infrastructural citizenship connotes not only in how public art might entail more critical and post‐foundational democratic dynamics (e.g. Landau and Toland 2022) but how these are also explicitly tied to the infrastructural settings of their appearance. It is an aesthetic disposition of certain artworks whereby the mediation of infrastructure itself becomes a site of insight, claim‐making, and emancipation (on infrastructural citizenship more generally, see Anand 2017; Chattopadhyay 2012; Lemanski 2019).…”