Wet-Togetherness [4]—Breathing: Torkwase Dyson and Itziar Okariz

Seemingly a banal act of taking air into the lungs and releasing it, breathing connects bodies to other bodies and bodies to the atmosphere. In breathing, bodies enact their existence and their interdependence across territories and identities. Yet breathing is too often unequally distributed, and the deprivation of air itself reminds us of the contentious, violent relations dictating the right to life. Torkwase Dyson interrogates the violence contained in the way human bodies emerge through the infrastructures outside of them, and the forms of resistance and invented freedom enacted in the circulation, affirmation, and dissolution of bodies into the material exteriority they are to be part of. Itziar Okariz focuses attention on breath understood as a zero degree of identity; and on how air enters and leaves the bodies, the flesh, and the fluids that compose them and their relationship with the atmosphere. Relations of fragility and interdependence.