Aerography
Air quality and creative practice


Aerography – from Greek aēr 'air' + -graphia 'writing' – reimagines the concept of air quality beyond numerical indices, contributing to recent research on air and atmospheres across the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Air quality normally refers to quantitative measures of air pollution calibrated against local, regional, and international standards. Limit values have become central to monitoring and regulation practices, but they cannot fully account for the complex and uneven burden of toxicity that emerges and accumulates through intimate relations of bodies and atmospheres. The aim of Aerography is to to propose ways of generating relational, situated, and polyvocal accounts of air quality via participatory arts, exhibition design, art-science collaboration, and interdisciplinary dialogue.

Locating the Research

This project was completed at the UCL Department of Geography, University College London. Research began in 2020, at the height of Covid-19 and #icantbreathe activism, when breathable air was politically and experientially at stake. Fieldwork became possible once quarantines lifted, starting in the UK via arts collaborations and ethnographic study in Oxford and London respectively. This was followed by a research visit at the University of Alicante, fieldwork in Andalusia, and an artist residency at the University of Bern. Each case study situates concerns about air pollution within a political, cultural, and social context.

Supervision and examination

This research was supported by a multidisciplinary team of experts. It was supervised by Professor Andrew Barry (UCL Department of Geography) and Professor Joy Sleeman (Slade School of Fine Art). The examiners were Professor Peg Rawes (The Bartlett School of Architecture) and Professor Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (Westminster Law and Theory Lab). The viva voce exam took place on October 4, 2024 and the result was pass without corrections. The thesis is currently embargoed due to ongoing publication plans but excerpts can be requested.

Project funding 2020-24

Aerography was made possible by a full scholarship from the London Arts and Humanities Partnership, a Doctoral Training Partnership created by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Additional project funding was obtained from Arts Council England, Art Fund, mLAB (University of Bern), TORCH (University of Oxford), A-N The Artists Information Company, and UCL Department of Geography.