Towards atmospheric care

Application summary

Towards atmospheric care is an art-led interdisciplinary research project jointly developed by visual artist Hanna Husberg and environmental scientist Agata Marzecova. The main aim of this 2-year long art-science collaboration is to cultivate a speculative commitment to postdisciplinary and ecofeminist care. The question of caring — and, in particular, caring for phenomena such as the atmosphere, which are imperceptible to our senses — will be used throughout the project as a central methodological approach. Asking: How can we care for what is inaccessible to direct experience, but still structures our daily lives? this inquiry envisages air and atmosphere as technoecological phenomena. These qualities of air are made explicit through three case studies: ‘As the air became this number’, ‘From aurora to geospace’ and ‘The new electronic ecosystem’. The grant will be used to, applying insights from our initial case study, develop and finalize the two others. Our final objective is to use the three examples to generate diverse but interrelated material (audiovisual installations, performance), textual (peer-reviewed and experiment writing) and pedagogical outcomes, that turn the theoretical notion of care into examples and tokens of practical commitment to (atmospheric) care. In order to produce collaboration, formats and outcomes with a strong feminist, posthumanist and queer emphasis we have invited gender scholar Liu Xin and curator Taru Elfving to accompany this work.