Air

Do we all breathe the same air? Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow Close your eyes. Breathe deeply. Feel your chest rise — air. And with each breath — life. Our first breath comes as we are separated from the inner atmosphere of our mother’s body. Oxygen and its companion gases move into our lungs. With each breath, our blood turns a brighter shade of red and we expel carbon dioxide; we create energy and convert it into growth. We breathe with all the animals of the Earth in an interwoven, interdependent cycle — the oxygen we draw from the air is continuously replenished by plants, trees and algae. Warmed by the Sun, our greenhouse planet spins through the depths of space, nestled in the Milky Way, one galaxy among many. We are surrounded by a unique and layered mix of life-supporting gases — our precious atmosphere, the air we breathe — only gravity holding this gauzy cloak to the Earth. At this moment in history, we are sensitive to air as never before: alert to airborne threats and aware of our shared reliance on it as vital. It is elusive, apparently immaterial and very often invisible, pure and impure, animating everything within us and occupying the space beyond us. While change is a constant, we live in a period of acceleration; as our atmosphere warms, so the impacts of each additional fraction of a degree cascade and we are driven to react, re-imagine and re-engineer. In doing so, our experience of COVID-19 has reinforced our interconnectedness as local and global communities, leading us — and many artists in ‘Air’ — to examine the world we live in and ask, ‘How can we better breathe together?’ Dora Budor / Origin II (Burning of the Houses) 2019 23 Do we all breathe the same air?