Breath Underworlds - Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering

Breath as Site and Struggle of Global Dis/Ordering

Rather than concentrating only on how the right to breathe is formally recognised (or not) in international law, this event foregrounds the patterns of dis/ordering that are embedded in infrastructures of toxicity, and the unevenly allocated affordances of breath and breathing these engender. This entails an attentiveness to forms of political resistance, new approaches to law and normativity, and modalities of political subjectivity that this focus on breath and breathability can foster (as investigated by the Logische Phantasie Lab’s Decentralized Right to Breathe). How, Breathing Aesthetics asks, are forces of ‘extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism’ tied to and materialized in the ‘contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air’? Which political coalitions and practices of resistance can emerge from such emergent configurations of breathing injustice?

The speakers:

Daniela Gandorfer is Lecturer at University of Westminster Law School, London, an affiliate of the Ethics Institute at Northeastern University, Boston, and the co-founder of Loph, a non-profit organization dedicated to decentralized and community-based approaches towards governance at the intersection of climate change, political reorganization, and new digital technologies. Before joining Westminster University, Daniela held postdoc positions at Princeton University and UC Santa Cruz, California. She received her PhD from Princeton University and is currently pursuing a MSc in Finance at LSE. Daniela’s research focuses on legal theory as well as on scientific and technological frontier spaces – such as web3, quantum physics, and psychedelics – and their implications for emerging forms of normativity and governance. Her book Matterphorics: On the Laws of Theory is forthcoming with Duke University Press.

Jean-Thomas Tremblay is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at York University, in Toronto. He is the author of Breathing Aesthetics, a co-author with Steven Swarbrick of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction, and a co-editor with Andrew Strombeck of Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s. His monograph in progress, The Art of Climate Inaction, challenges the absorption of climate action by expansionist models under late liberalism.

Event Resources:


A Decentralized Right to Breathe, Logische Phantasie Lab (co-directed by Daniela Gandorfer)
Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Breathing Aesthetics
Jean-Thomas Tremblay, ‘Feminist Breathing’
Lenart Skof and Emily A. Holmes (eds), Breathing with Luce Irigaray
Arthur Rose, Asbestos – The Last Modernist Object
Timothy Choy, ‘Museum of Breathers’
All that Breathes
Natalie Dederichs, Atmosfears: The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction
Tatiana Konrad (ed), Imagining Air: Cultural Axiology and the Politics of Invisibility
Achille Mbembe, ‘The Universal Right to Breathe’
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
A quote from Patricia J William’s Alchemy of Race:

‘In discarding rights altogether, one discards a symbol too deeply enmeshed in the psyche of the oppressed to lose without trauma and much resistance. Instead, society must give them away. Unlock them from reification by giving them to slaves. Give them to trees. Give them to cows. Give them to history. Give them to rivers and rocks. Give to all of society’s objects and untouchables the rights of privacy, integrity, and self-assertion; give them distance and respect. Flood them with the animating spirit that rights mythology fires in this country’s most oppressed psyches, and wash away the shrouds of inanimate-object status, so that we may say not that we own gold but that a luminous golden spirit owns us’.

Additional credits for Daniela’s talk:

Researchers (audio):


Layla Varkey
Ananya Malhotra
Tiffany Critchlow
Ariane Fong
Nadin M