“We are socialised into imagining air as emptiness, void of substance and invisible. Air is seen as devoid of history and relation. But it’s an invisibility linked to the ocularcentrism of Western capitalistic modernity,” said Helene Strauss of the Department of English at the University of the Free State.
“In this seminar, I consider the creative mediation of carbon-capitalism’s atmospheric effects, attending specifically to the symbiotic atmospheric pathways that connect plant and human breath. Scholars concerned with overlapping histories of colonial land theft, patriarchy, and air pollution have long sought to challenge the belief that airscapes are empty and available for infinite occupation and reconstitution without having to attend to what already populates air, including trans-material chemical and vegetal atmospheric entanglements, and the ecological and spiritual knowledges and modes of embodiment that these atmospheric interdependencies have historically sustained,” she continued. “Alongside a groundswell of critical cultural theory associated with the so-called vegetal and atmospheric turns, I take the inextricable interdependence of breath and vegetation as the starting point from which to explore pathways towards repairing relationships severed by petro-capitalist modernity.”
Strauss started with a breathing exercise in which she challenged the audience to think about how air makes itself known to them and what words they use to describe it. “Air challenges our capacity to translate breath into language and aesthetic form,” she said. “It defies our sense of time and space, inside and outside, and evades our efforts at cognitive and sensorial capture.”
Strauss explained that according to the World Health Organization, 99% of people globally breathe unsafe air, leading to at least seven million premature deaths per year. “According to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/unmasking-the-toll-of-fine-particle-pollution-in-south-africa/) in South Africa this leads to an estimated 42 000 deaths annually and amounted to 8% of all deaths in 2023.”
“I want us to take up the challenge posed by scholars such as Nerea Calvillo and Hsuan Hsu to de-invisibilise, re-materialise and decolonise air and atmospheres, and to embrace their pluriversality,” she said.
She described the relationship between plants, air, humans and more than humans: “There has been continued rupturing of the symbiotic relationships needed to sustain multispecies breath,” she said. “The mass extraction of fossil fuels, in particular, has been undoing the constraints that renewable resources historically placed on unchecked growth – bringing only short-term, unevenly shared benefits.”
“My book project will explore ways of thinking, breathing, and smelling with plants that bring the material and spiritual interdependencies required to build post-smog futures anew into focus.”
Strauss sees artists and writers as important guides in this struggle to relink plant and human health. The written works she highlighted included Unbowed by Wangari Maathai, A Question of Power by Bessie Head, This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Vegetarian by Han Kang, and Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh.
She also drew on examples from recent artwork and films that “offer plant-oriented alternatives to fossil-fuel capitalism’s chokehold on the earth’s atmosphere. Far from reading plants as straightforward saviours in the fight for risk-free air, however, I insist that we consider the complex ‘phyto-political’ (Catriona Sandilands) relationships that made plants key protagonists in histories of both colonial violence and decolonial repair.”
Her research foregrounds the air that converges in the phytosphere, a term that she extends from its traditional usage by plant scientists to include the atmospheric meeting point between plant chemistry and other airborne particulate matter. ““The phytosphere comprises three parts,” she explained, “each defined in terms of a specific set of symbiotic microbial relationships: the phyllosphere (the above-ground interactions between leaves and atmosphere), the endosphere (the internal habitat of the plant), and the rhizosphere (the meeting point of root and soil). My interest here lies in a broader definition of the phytosphere as the atmospheric contact zone between plant chemistry and other particulate and respiratory animacies, even as I acknowledge each part of the phytosphere in the narrower sense to play a role in shaping phyto-atmospheric and phyto-political relations more broadly.”
“Air in the phytosphere includes the atmospheric terrain where plants, humans and more than humans reside,” she added. “We need to reframe the atmosphere as phytospheric.”
Art and activism – fighting for breathable air
Unpacking the long history of harm in South Africa includes looking at the history of mining and its effects on generations of miners. Strauss referred to the 2018 documentary Dying for Gold written and directed by Richard Pakleppa and Catherine Meyburgh which depicts the story of mining in South Africa, Mozambique, Lesotho and Malawi, and “details the mass respiratory crisis from the late 19th century in South Africa in which miners were knowingly infected with silicosis and TB”.
She also highlighted Eureka – an art installation by Janine Allen-Spies and André Rose, that premiered in 2022 at the William Humphreys Art Gallery in Kimberley – that investigates artisanal diamond mining in the Northern Cape Province.
“The exhibition is a transdisciplinary collaboration between community health and art. It focuses on sites of abandonment where Zama Zamas (artisanal and informal miners) now work at risk to their health and safety – sometimes referred to as ‘the second diamond rush’. It’s a study in exposure – to sun, weather, waste and violence, and the dusty signature this leaves on the earth and lungs.”
She specifically highlighted the piece ‘Hole with Tumbleweed’ by Janine Allen. The painting references the famous Kimberly Big Hole which she described as “a poster child for the damage that mining can do to the earth”.
She explained that the exhibition exposes the long-term effects of South African racial capitalism, particularly the cost on miners and more than humans. “Holes in the ground are good at hiding costs,” she said. These are sites of deep contradiction – the source of massive wealth for some but also great danger to the workforce.
“It highlights human exploitation and ecosystem damage at catastrophic scales,” she added. “Eureka points us to alternate modes of knowing and relating.”
She noted that in South Africa currently climate change alongside ongoing capitalist industrial development is exacerbating all of this. But she also referred to efforts to fight back, including the so-called Deadly Air Case in which social and environmental justice groups groundWork and the Vukani Environmental Justice Movement have taken the South African government to Court for protection from toxic air pollution in Mpumalanga (which has some of the dirtiest air in the world) invoking Section 24 of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to an environment not harmful to health or wellbeing. They argued that this right is immediately realisable as opposed to a progressive obligation, and that the state’s inaction was infringing upon it.
“The case ended in victory,” said Strauss, “but there has been virtually no implementation. Residents in the area continue to breathe very dangerous air.”
Air quality continues to be appalling, for many reasons. See, for instance, https://www.spotlightnsp.co.za/2025/08/18/battle-to-breathe-the-ongoing-struggle-for-clean-air-in-mpumalanga/#:~:text=Whereas%20the%20air%20quality%20management,exemptions%20from%20South%20Africa’s%20minimum
She also hihlighted the work of the non-governmental organisation Living Limpopo which is opposing the intended Musina-Makhado Special Economic Zone − a Chinese-South African state-backed industrial mega-project to drive coal strip-mining in the Vhembe Biosphere Reserve (a UNESCO biosphere) (see https://livinglimpopo.org/).
Touching on the feminist aspects, she said: “Women are at the forefront of efforts to repair patriarchal-colonial systems of domination. Many of the organisations in the fight for clean air have been women-led, as the interdependence of gender and climate injustice is at the centre of their daily lives.”
“For centuries colonialism has offloaded the effects of unchecked growth onto the people least responsible and most vulnerable. The endpoints of capitalism are becoming eerily clear. Unchecked growth means planetary disintegration,” she observed. “Asking plants to save us is not feasible within the current economic logic.”
“We need help to imagine ways out of this mess. Much of this work has been done by creative cultural workers such as writers, artists, and filmmakers from the Global South who have been making carbon capitalism’s devastating atmospheric effects available to human cognition, feeling and activism,” she added.
“To enhance the life-giving capacities of air,” she concluded, “requires not only the restoration of partnerships between people, place, plants and atmospheres, but also of the rituals, songs, sensations, stories, botanical knowledges and cosmologies that foster these partnerships.”
Michelle Galloway: Part-time media officer at STIAS
Photograph: SCPS Photography