Corporeal Matters – serie

Breathing is an unavoidable, vital act, yet it cannot be taken for granted, as the experiences of the pandemic, profound changes in our environment, but also structural, racist discrimination make clear. In the physical act of breathing, we are symbolically, materially and radically thrown back to our own bodies and connected to the bodies of others.In conversation with artists and theorists from different fields, the contributers to this volume explore different acts of suffocation and release. They show how the protection of bodies is unequally and ambivalently distributed and how it can be an act of resistance. It is an insistence on life, a demand for existential, political, symbolic and ethical recognition.

Since its invention in the late nineteenth century, the penetrating gaze of the X-ray has changed our vision of the inside of the human body. After we started to see inside ourselves, the relationship between ourselves and our bodies changed forever. As a progression in medical science, X-ray technology was fashioned to maintain and save life. However, as the contributors to this volume show, it has been a device of ruination as well. They visualise the traces and the pattern of violence, practised by the states, racial capitalism, colonial racism and sexism. By juxtaposing different cases across time and space, this collection demonstrates a set of relations between civilization and ruination.

In what ways is class present in looks, gestures and attitudes? What are the effects of how it is translated? And how are assimilation and adaptation staged and rehearsed? At a time when many societies and communities are becoming fragmented, the contributors ask how class and classism manifest in the body, particularly in the arts and cultural sectors. They consider the body to be both the subject of practice and discourse on class and a methodology that helps us to understand how classism works. Adopting an intersectional approach, the volume treats origin-based discrimination as a highly corporeal, performative and aesthetic matter.