Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note

The act of breathing is perhaps the most intimate and constant means of communing with our world. In breathing, we incorporate and refashion the atmospheres that we share with others, human and otherwise, into a community ubiquitously affected by this life-sustaining process. But breath also contributes to our fragility. It can be taken away and restricted, made labored or uneasy, corrupted by pathogens, or impaired by smog. It is a necessity easily wrested and often repressed — those who revolt, as Frantz Fanon wrote, do so “simply because, for many reasons, [they] can no longer breathe” (Black Skin White Masks, 1986, 226).  

In this issue, Venti aims to explore this tension between respiration’s vitality and precarity in the productive space between the inhalation and the exhalation of breath. To inhale is to feel oneself intimately within one’s surroundings, a means of inspiration, corporeally filling one’s lungs and mentally arousing creative energies. To exhale is an expulsion of spirit, accompanying a whisper, a song, or a cry. Breathing is so necessary that it is generally an unconscious action, an innate choice, of being alive. Whether noticed or unnoticed, most simply, breath is the process of taking air into and expelling it from our lungs. 

How, then, might political, aesthetic, or historical metaphors of breath inform our concepts of environment, embodiment, community, or relation? If the act of breathing is a means of producing, how can respiration be captured, mediated, and portrayed? This past year of vexed — and, for many, suppressed or suffocated — breathing has demonstrated that unobstructed and uncontaminated air is inequitably distributed. The act of breathing begs the ever-important questions of who is allowed to breathe, who is given the choice to breathe, and whose access to breath is decided by others.

________

To celebrate the anniversary of the founding of Venti Journal: Air, Experience, and Aesthetics, “Inhale/Exhale” features not twenty but thirty pieces dedicated to exploring the above themes. This issue particularly draws out the collaborative nature of Venti and the act of breathing, itself. As our primary goal is to create a community of scholars and artists that seek to explore the indexical qualities of air and our awareness of it through effects and affects, woven throughout this issue are works of visual art paired with an interpretation by a member of our editorial board. 

All the artworks “demand attention, requiring us to pause, take a breath and look,” as Jenna Wendler writes of Kinga Földi’s silk pin-tucked sculptures. Although primarily two dimensional, artists like Karen Snouffer, Samira Abbassy, Melissa Joseph, and Jenny Filipetti center their work on an awareness of the body’s relationship to space — how we feel our bodies, internally and externally to experience creativity, construct identity, and realize a state of being, emotion, or memory in visual terms. The idea of a communal and empathetic act of breathing is foregrounded in the artwork of Luisa Rabbia, in which boundaries between figures are blurred and open up to otherness. Yet in her work, we also see the precarity in breathing and feel the tremendous loss of lives by way of asphyxiation — just as James Ginzburg’s musical environment underscores his ability to breathe and expand beyond himself despite his statement:  “I’m afraid of the air outside my mouth.”

The collaborative nature of the issue extends to a number of writings that are co-authored and interdisciplinary in nature. Our issue begins with the haunting translation by M. Martin (Mort) Guiney of Vincent Barras’s prose poem “Poum” that vividly details the sound of losing breath in hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly in “Breathing Worlds,” Derek McCormack and Lucy Sabin touch on the aesthetic and medical dimensions of breathing to suggest that breath is both personal and universal. Jennifer Scappettone and Nicholas Calvin Mwakatobe’s visual poem unfolds in colorful lines and words in their collaborative film, “Populist Pastoral (In Smoke).” In “The Sky in Us,” Marc Higgin and Anaïs Tondeur, an anthropologist and artist, come together to examine how the environment mediates our breathing and in turn how art allows us to visualize the precarity of the primarily invisible process of inhalation and exhalation. Victoria Herche and David Kern read Ted Chiang’s short story “Exhalation” as a meditation on air as a novel way to think through crisis and the boundary between life and death.

The final collaboration is actually the first — the preface for this issue was written by advisory board member Jean-Thomas Tremblay. In order to save space for their insightful introduction, our editorial note stops here, but first, we’d like to extend our immense gratitude to Jean-Thomas, Charlotte Bravin-Lee for her beautiful watercolor for the issue’s cover, our faculty advisor Andrei Pop, and all our contributors. We hope that as one shifts from reading to looking to listening, Venti’s fourth issue will exhale multiple modalities of aesthetic interaction and attention, allowing us to be inspired by and inhale new airy sensations with the digital turn of each page. 

- The Editors