Can we breathe?

copyright Michael Pinsky, Pollution Pods, Norway

KING, D.: Can we breathe?, In: Parr, Debra; Lynn, Gwen, Olfactory Art and The Political in an Age of Resistance, Routledge, 2021.

Inhalation and exhalation stand for exchange and border-crossing between an organism and its environment. Just as breathing can connect the inside and the outside in a positive sense, not being able to breathe or inhaling something unpleasant may lead to exclusion, a feeling of non-connectedness, or in the worst case to death. Breathing is essential for being alive. Breathing also should mean living a life on equal terms. The two olfactory artworks I discuss here address questions of social inequality. For Vaporización (2002), Teresa Margolles fills galleries with a foggy mist created from the water used to wash corpses of drug cartel murder victims in the Mexico City morgue. Through breathing in the artwork, one participates in the victims’ fates. The architecture Pollution Pods (2017) by Michael Pinsky is a series of interconnected domes, each simulating a different pollution cocktail from cities around the world, showing that distinctive local smells are often based on developments of globalization or climate change. Both artworks set the impulse to become aware of one’s own breath and its conditions. Could breathing in art, and perceiving art via smell, create more empathy for other human beings when visual impact is simply not enough?