On March 8, 2019, Prof. Eva Horn (University of Vienna) joined our Spring Colloquium series with a paper entitled: “Air: For a Cultural History of Climate.” The essay built on work published in Fall 2018 in the journal Grey Room (“Air as Medium”). Starting from her landmark monograph on Zukunft als Katastrosphe (Fischer, 2014), Horn sought to reorient current debates on the Anthropocene by focusing on questions concerning the ontology of air as a diaphanous, all-enveloping medium. Her essay discussed the history of cultural and literary engagement with the medium “air” prior to the scholarly negotiation of environmental concerns that animates the environmental humanities. As she pointed out, because of its ephemeral quality air has traditionally been considered magic or quasi-sacred, sharing its nature with celestial and ethereal bodies. This has made it a perennial, if elusive, object of fascination—a fascination that art and literature capture in unique ways. Horn pleaded for learning from the ways contemporary art engages with the mediality of air, pointing to the aesthetic as a fruitful arena that goes beyond the science- and data-driven thrust of current debates to dwell on the singularity of the experiences framed by our relation to the environment. (Mariaenrica Giannuzzi)
