IN
NL
About the Project
Atmospheric Entanglements (AE) is a framework for the development of Planetary Curricula in research-based design and artistic practice. AE works in trans-regional, collaborative partnerships in order to rethink design, architectural and artistic pedagogies through comparative site-based research, hands-on production, and public mediation enacted by students in group projects. Responding to the unprecedented condition of recognising a ‘planetary’ historical turn that yokes the social with the climactic, we ask – both theoretically and experimentally – how practice-based research pedagogies ought to respond, alongside students who will shape curricula to come from their respective fields.
The inaugural iteration of AE is enacted through a collaboration between students in the Critical Inquiry Lab at the Design Academy Eindhoven (NL), and the BFA program at Jindal School of Liberal Arts & Humanities (IN), supported by a Virtual International Collaboration Project grant from the Netherlands. The theme of this inaugural collaboration, “The Materiality of Air / The Right to Breathe,” is inspired by Achille Mbembe’s observation that real and ongoing geographical historical differences, nonetheless do not foreclose on the universality of the ‘Right to Breathe’. A simple slogan that encapsulates an important and complex intersection: the social, notably from the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police in the US and the painful cry heard across the world ‘I can’t breathe’, and air pollution tethered to political economy and Capitalist forms of life. Together, we’ll inhabit this intersection that ‘Air’ opens up from the indiscipline of artistic and research-based design. Whilst foregrounding situated and field-based research, we’ll be emphasising trans-scalar, and trans-regional reflections, since the medium of ‘air’ is uncontainable by geographical territory – in other words, air is both local and non-local, that is, atmospheric.
Guided by seminars, lectures and mentors from a variety of fields ranging from artistic practice to public health, to legal designation, students also engage in the creation of open-source pedagogical exercises from their generational perspective to be shared on this website in a peer-to-peer ethos. Locales, histories, and knowledges are woven into dialogue shared by young practitioners facing the most acute effects of an entangled planetary condition, that is experienced differentially, yet can only be navigated commonly, looking at resonances and frictions that guide a reengineering of the purposefulness of creative practice from a planetary perspective.
Bibliographic Inspiration
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Gabriel O. Apata
‘I Can’t Breathe’: The Suffocating Nature of Racism
2020
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Achille Mbembe
The Universal Right to Breathe:
Colonialism & the Ethics Of MemoryLecture
2020
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Nerea Calvillo
Aeropolis:
Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds2023
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Desiree Foerster
Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes
2021
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Sachit Mahajan Jennifer Gabrys Joanne Armitage
AirKit: A Citizen-Sensing Toolkit for Monitoring Air Quality
2021
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Dipesh Chakrabarty
The Climate of History in a Planetary Age
Lecture & Panel Discussion
2021
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Sasha Engelmann Sophie Dyer Lizzie Malcolm Daniel Powers
Open-weather:
Speculative-feminist propositions for planetary images in an era of climate crisis2022
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Eva Horn
The Case of Air
2022