Breathing in Disaster: Christina Battle’s Forecast

How do we breathe in/ breathe in disaster? Artist Christina Battle’s Forecast series (2020—ongoing) explores what it means to breathe in climate disaster, using prompts and observations to encourage its participants to sense and anticipate the drastically changing weather around them. Critiquing environmental racism, Battle’s work highlights the “unequal distribution of air pollutants,” activating Forecast with communities in Newfoundland, Toronto, and Edmonton in works like the air we breathe (2022) and Learning the Signals/Change is Coming (2022/2023). This exhibition review of Forecast presented at Gallery 1C03 (Treaty 1 Territory) highlights the significance of community-oriented, intimate actions of breathing and observation to grasp how environmental catastrophes are felt differently across geographies. This essay is rooted in the author’s ongoing conversations with Battle, and takes cues from Christina Sharpe’s idea of weather, Kristin Simmons’ notion of settler atmospherics and adrienne marée brown’s principles of emergent strategy.