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.