Materiële betrokkenheid voor rechtvaardige atmosferen

The ways we produce, build, travel, and farm have changed the air around us. The air we breathe is affected by pollutants, with fine particulate matter from industry, traffic, and farming posing serious risks to human health. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution causes around seven million premature deaths each year, while more than 90 percent of the world’s population breathes air that exceeds the WHO’s recommended safety limits.

Although everyone is exposed to air pollution, its effects are shared unevenly. Communities in the Global South, as well as economically disadvantaged communities in the Global North, bear a disproportionate share of the burden.

Air pollution affects more than human health. Carbon-dioxide emissions drive global warming, while nitrogen emissions from industry and agriculture damage ecosystems and reduce biodiversity. Although largely invisible, the consequences of nitrogen emissions become tangible through changes in vegetation, soils, farming practices, and environmental regulations. The Dutch nitrogen crisis revealed how reactive nitrogen is deeply entangled with housing, infrastructure, agriculture, and environmental governance, making visible its far-reaching ecological, political, and economic consequences.

Yet because air pollution consists largely of invisible gases and microscopic particles, it is difficult to see—and therefore these effects can be difficult to fully grasp and easy to overlook or even ignore.

While air may seem the same wherever we go, it is always shaped by the places, people, and activities around it. A Situated Material Engagement (SME) approach offers a way to understand air as local, relational, and lived rather than abstract and universal. This can involve, for example, community-led air-quality monitoring at a neighborhood level (Gabrys 2022), creating experiences that make climate change feel-able as a lived and embodied condition of weathering (Neimanis and Hamilton 2026) and transforming environmental data into tangible materials and artistic experiences that make the invisible perceptible.

Combining PhD research with an artistic residency at Instituto Buena Bista in Curaçao, this project explores connections between agricultural nitrogen emissions in the southern Netherlands and Belgium and broader global air pollution. Taking an SME approach, it examines how air can be materialized and experienced through art and design, creating new ways for citizens, researchers, policymakers, and artists to engage with shared atmospheric challenges across local and global contexts.