99% of the global population breathe air that exceeds World Health Organization limits (World Health Organization, n.d.) making air pollution the largest environmental hazard to human health worldwide (Lancet, 2024, p. 2162). While a universal threat, the levels of harm are unevenly distributed. It is those who contribute the least, the racialised, gendered and poor who bear the brunt of aerosol dumping (Clean Air Fund; Calvillo, 2023).
To focus on breath is a framework for engaging with invisible worlds outside oneself through an intimate, embodied knowledge. Each inhale binds us to our surroundings, exchanging oxygen, spores, skin-cells, pollution, stories, rights, chemicals and particulate matter. Every exhale returns to the earth, where our breath is transmuted throughout other porous beings… the atmosphere… the seas and the clouds. Respiration is a reciprocal relationship with the world.
Being part of global-breathing-body reveals that we cannot opt-out of an environment that we are intrinsic part of. For respiring bodies, air is life. This text traces our intimate relations to particulate matter and offers alternative ways to attune to the airs, toward atmospheric responsibility, connectivity/ collectivity and care, recognising our toxic inheritances and polluted legacies. In the words of Nerea Calvillo, to protect future breaths we need to de-invisibilise and re-politicise the atmosphere (Calvillo, 2023, p. 26)…
I breathe out and you breathe in.
It is in the end a story about exchange.
Image 1: Global-Breathing-Bodies, Megan Willow Hack, illustration, 2025.
Background: Close-up of We Definitely Don’t All Breathe The Same Air, Megan Willow Hack, Foraged pigments from Goldsmiths Campus: birch leaves, oak galls, chestnut, ivy, hawthorn, particulate matter extracted from the air (PM2.5- 10.3µg/m3) on canvas, 200cm x 200cm, 2025.