Wet-Togetherness [4]—Breathing: Torkwase Dyson and Itziar Okariz presented by Shanghai Biennale

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are composed out of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies, defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects.

Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of 9 sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll with the sound design of Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang.

Episode 4. Breathing: Torkwase Dyson and Itziar OkarizSeemingly 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.