Every five seconds someone dies prematurely from air pollution (UN, 2019). Environmental degradation, however, is not limited to the air above alone, but also affects the conditions of life underneath the surface. Black lung disease (pneumoconiosis), a respiratory condition, is by far the most common occupational illness in China today. Official reports suggest that over half a million people, almost exclusively rural migrants, live with the incurable disease. The real number could be 10 times as high (SCMP, 2021). The respiratory condition is a powerful reminder of the shared geological intimacy that exists between the bodies of miners and the materiality that constitutes the enveloping atmospheres of the underworld.Inspired by Hawkins’ (2020b, p. 4) idea of the “underground’s imaginative force” and the so-called “geologic turn” (Ellsworth & Kruse, 2013), this paper explores the politics of subterranean atmospheres in China by problematising the relationship between the ground above and the ground below. I analyse this “geologic politics” (Clark, 2013) through the artwork of filmmaker Zhao Liang and the painter Yang Shaobin, both contemporary artists working on subterranean lives, bodies, emotions and atmospheres. Through their art of the subterranean, its environment, lived experience, embodiment and the specificity and intimacy of its materiality, I capture a politics that challenges false binaries of a separate above and below.

Depuis une décennie, l’exploitation de la formation d’hydrocarbure Vaca Muerta en Argentine charrie son lot de polémiques politico-économique et écologique en raison des dommages environnementaux graves survenus. Ces transformations ont, aussi, des conséquences sur l’expérience sensible des habitants de la région. En se fondant sur une étude qui mêle méthodes sociologiques et ethnographiques, cet article vise à explorer la façon dont les opposants à ce projet décryptent les ambiances qui se dégage d’un complexe industriel qui rend difficile la distinction entre sous-sol, surface et atmosphère. En pénétrant et en enveloppant les mondes de la vie quotidienne, ces ambiances créent un désordre décelable dans les témoignages et les pratiques des opposants. L’analyse de ces formes de critiques ordinaires permet, en outre, de souligner l’importance de l’expérience sensible à l’heure de fomenter des actions collectives dirigées contre ces industries extractives.

Taking the UK Grime artist Stormzy’s performance at Glastonbury 2019 as a case study, this article investigates the tactics, technologies and processes revealed through the act of staging atmospheres. Process-based philosophies of experience, such as pluriversal design and worlding, are adopted to examine the ontologically ‘nonbinary’ perspectives that an atmosphere-led stage aesthetics invite. Methodologically, Stormzy’s headlining act produced by TAXBOX and collaborators is analyzed through the geographer Derek McCormack’s approach to speculative devices (such as balloons or stage sets) as ‘doing atmospheric things’. This includes an analysis of stage atmospheres as indeterminate ‘worlding envelopes’ and the role of atmospherics in enacting, projecting, or affirming possible worlds for Black British culture. McCormack’s proposal of atmospheric envelopment is extended into the study of theatre and performance by positioning ‘scenographics’ as a type of atmospherics. Put simply, this article offers an initial argument for considering the tactical affects of scenographics within the production of atmospherics. The article concludes with a challenge to category-based (binary) stage ontologies and argues the benefits of atmospherics as a process-based (nonbinary) approach to stage aesthetics.

This paper revisits the circumstances surrounding Brazilian theatre director, Augusto Boal’s first recorded experiment with Invisible Theatre in a restaurant in Buenos Aires (1972) in light of Anderson’s (2014) theory of affective atmospheres in their capacity to mediate structures of feeling. Drawing on original archival and performance-based research, I advance a critical account of Restaurant Theatre: The Law through a narrative reimagining of the performance and key evidence concerning the law in question that fundamentally challenges Boal’s claims for the technique as a means of social liberation from forces of oppression. The alternative possibility explored here is that Invisible Theatre developed in Boal’s practice as an atmospheric reaction to militaristic forms of urban encounter and a means with which to infiltrate structural feelings of fear. This idea is traced through Boal’s encounters with state apparatus of affective control as a political prisoner and marked dissident in exile, and with the performative concept of camouflage. Freed from the overdetermining binaries of oppressor and oppressed, I suggest Invisible Theatre can open up opportunities for practitioners seeking to stage affective atmospheres to produce transformative encounters and perceptions.

Picture yourself spending several years studying the artistic activity of a famous contemporary artist. Someday you are told that the artist, Jonathan Meese, is going to produce a work in virtual reality (VR) for the ARTE channel and one of Berlin’s leading institutions specializing in immersive artworks, the Berliner Festspiele. In this piece, he will stage his creative process and the intimate sphere of his relationship with the person who puts him to work: his own mother. This performance, filmed in 360° by an expert technical team, is a perfect opportunity to take a lesson in sensory documentation as well as an exploration of the possibilities offered by this emerging medium. The production team commissioned me to do a series of ethnographic drawings about the production process of this work. Through these images, I depict the process of staging the performance. In this article, I describe a theatrical object “in the making.” In the last part, I highlight the specific component related to VR devices in this performance and the mediating effect that this technology imposes on it. This will allow me to show how the production process and the atmospheric dimension of the phenomenon are closely intertwined, and what immersive media can contribute to contemporary thinking on atmospheres in anthropology — and to the topic of ethnographic drawing.

In this article aural attunement is put forward as a means of performative writing to attend closely to affective relations with nonhuman entities (namely birds). Embodied knowledge harnessed in the writing aims to emulate the experience of being a listening-spectator at Slideshow Birdshow (2013), a solo contemporary performance piece by Emma Bennett. Whilst it is recognised that non-representational theory is a catch-all term to describe affect, atmosphere, and lived experience occurring in the social and relational aspects of our daily lives, the articulation of such dimensions are complicated and not fully translatable into words. Here it is argued, through a critically-intimate writing practice, that contemporary performance and performative writing have much to offer to the ongoing debates within human geography in relation to this. The use of aural attunement to attend to micro-movements, vibrations, rhythm and tone indicate a more sensorial engagement thereby highlighting our affective relations with the nonhuman.

The creative turn within geography has seen a number of returns to the artists’ studio as a site for exploring the vital, immanent, and affective relations that form these spaces of creative practice. Where interviews, observations, collaborations, with artists have directed attention to the non-representational, this paper approaches the studio as both a scene, and an atmospheric staging. Taking up broader discourses around the scenographic, it argues that scenes not only take account of the durational and compositional construction of studio spaces, but can be understood as a form of training and attunement through which participants are enrolled in the joint composition of studio atmospheres and registers. It directs attention to the agency that these compositions have in the production of the studio imaginary.

In this second special issue of Ambiances on Staging Atmospheres, we return to the material and metaphorical felicity by which theatrical performance, design and their reception, present themselves to critical and political thinking in relation to atmosphere. We note, amongst other factors, the particular significance of scenography – at once an intellectual and aesthetic concern – in providing a framework by which to consider the material presence of atmospheres within theatrical events themselves, and by extension, in quotidian and other milieux beyond them. Moreover, we consider how, across the considerable range of examples offered by our contributors, the heuristic of staging is released from a somewhat moribund connection to the ‘stage set’ and instead becomes a process of lived encounters with the affects and affordances of social and material environments.

This article explores new perspectives on Alfred N. Whitehead’s process philosophy through a micro-phenomenological investigation of the experience of atmospheres. Whitehead’s philosophy and micro-phenomenology are both interested in something before it becomes a perceivable quality, yet from a different angle. Atmospheres, always at the brink of our awareness, are taken as a field of possible experiences that opens up when the perception of objects is replaced by processes. An exploration of sensual experience and meaning-making enabled by atmospheric media through process philosophy and micro-phenomenology helps situate new conceptual attempts at the relationship between humans and their environments. I will pay special attention to those parts of experience that impact assumptions about the relationship between humans and their environments and will suggest that atmospheric awareness offers opportunities for critical reflection and acceptance of difference. I propose that a new perspective on Whitehead’s philosophy through micro-phenomenology provides fruitful connections to contemporary research on experience and meaning-making. In explicating my subjective experience with atmospheric processes, I make a first step towards tracing the processes of experience as described by Whitehead in my own experience and thereby offer a way to acknowledge subjective experience that might inspire a wider range of scholarship.

This paper examines the atmospheres generated by the elemental power of bushfires as embodiment, invention and reconstruction through choreography. Drawing upon Bachelard’s analysis of the phenomenology of fire leads to an appreciation of its substance and symbolic volatility, that is interlaced with an understanding of fire’s place in the Australian environment from both settler and indigenous perspectives. The close examination of several dances, that use different expressive vocabularies and structures, provides a means to access the experience of fire as an affect and a moving vital force in expressive formations that record real historical events and their impact. The atmosphere becomes then both the generator and the residue of movement. In conclusion, the paper gives attention to debates about climate change, in the context of the Anthropocene and ecofeminism, and suggests that the bushfire is more destructive than it ever has been, not because of its “wild nature” but because of the influence of humans in causing greater destruction. Greater awareness of the nature-culture of fire in performance is therefore valuable to other disciplines in so far as it facilitates what I’m calling “combustion” without loss of life, in recognition also of the experience of loss and regeneration.