Breathing is an unavoidable, vital act, yet it cannot be taken for granted, as the experiences of the pandemic, profound changes in our environment, but also structural, racist discrimination make clear. In the physical act of breathing, we are symbolically, materially and radically thrown back to our own bodies and connected to the bodies of others.

In conversation with artists and theorists from different fields, the contributers to this volume explore different acts of suffocation and release. They show how the protection of bodies is unequally and ambivalently distributed and how it can be an act of resistance. It is an insistence on life, a demand for existential, political, symbolic and ethical recognition.