Air Can Break Your Heart

A sudden thunderstorm forced attendees at a launch for Spanish architect Nerea Calvillo’s Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxipolluted Worlds to huddle on a stairway inside Columbia University’s Avery Hall. Editors Joanna Joseph and Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt initially planned to stage the proceedings out in the elements. But the change of venue was rather fitting as it made everyone hypercognizant of the building’s stifling air and thus primed them for a conversation about the book’s themes. Aeropolis is rooted in larger discourses on queer ecology, which seek to give agency to the nonhuman, and remarks from Mabel Wilson, Iván L. Munuera, and others reflected this focus. “Breathing is political,” said Munuera. “We breathe people,” added Kirkham-Lewitt. Wilson emphasized that air spoke with “multiple voices” and commented on the book’s propensity to “drift” through varying practices of relationality and care. For her part, Calvillo framed queerness as avoiding classification and dwelling comfortably in contradiction. “Aeropolis is a queering territory,” she said, before inviting everyone to become “Aeropolians.”