Towards a sensory politics of the Anthropocene: Exploring activist-artistic approaches to politicizing air pollution

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate five activist-artistic approaches to argue for a sensory politics of the Anthropocene. Our aim is to highlight the affective and speculative potentials of art by examining how artists engage with the senses to make air pollution and its political implications visible, tangible, or otherwise experiential. The paper touches on widerreaching discourses on the politics of sensing, sensible politics, and sensory studies. Rather than situating air pollution within a policy framework, such as that of the international sustainable development goals, we locate our arguments within recent scholarship on postpolitics and the Anthropocene. Despite its epistemological slipperiness, we consider the Anthropocene to be a potent heuristic as well as a rich resource of ideas, data, and collaborative and antagonistic potential for artists working on issues of air pollution. The five case studies are each grounded in an explicit engagement with at least one of the five basic senses and include works by Amy Balkin, Hanna Husberg, Zane Cerpina and Stahl Stenslie, Lingling Zhang, Kitchen Budapest and Baltan Laboratories (NL). Clustered into three lines of argumentation, we demonstrate the ways in which these works contribute to the politicization of air: first, by framing air as a contested common good that problematizes the commodification of clean air; second, by integrating artistic research and environmental communication strategies; and third, by providing sensory experiences of the complicated constellations of agency and perception in the interscalar phenomenon of air pollution. Although our analysis is not exhaustive, three particularities could be identified in the works: an openness to other forms of knowledge and communication; a potent critique of the Anthropocene; and a radical questioning of ‘the political’. In conclusion, we argue that art can mobilize a sense of urgency and empowerment towards a multi-sensory politics of the Anthropocene.