The lungs of David Attenborough: voice and breath in Layla Vardo’s Orders of magnitude

Do you recognize me, air, full of places I once absorbed?
You who were the smooth bark,
roundness, and leaf of my words.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘The Sonnets to Orpheus’¹Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘The Sonnets to Orpheus: Second Part, I’, in Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell, The Modern Library, 1995, p. 463.

Introduction
The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) held the second edition of Melbourne Now in 2023, a group exhibition that showcased artists and designers contributing to the cultural fabric of Melbourne. On level three of The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, nestled in a small dark room, played a single-channel video by Welsh Australian artist Layla Vardo. Vardo’s archival work, Orders of magnitude, 2021, was acquired by the NGV in 2021 and shown in 2023, two years after debuting at the Footscray Community Art Centre as part of the Footscray Art Prize, for which she was a finalist.

Over a running time of roughly five-and-a-half minutes, Vardo presents a chronological sequence of clips from the seventy-odd-year on-screen career of British broadcaster and natural historian Sir David Attenborough. In each clip, Attenborough is shown taking a breath prior to addressing the camera – but before a single word can be spoken, Vardo cuts to the next clip. What this means is that David Attenborough’s utterly distinct, instantly recognisable voice is entirely absent from the work. Instead, Vardo presents us with an assemblage of inhalations and gestures. From grainy black-and-white footage of the dashing young presenter to crisply defined colour scenes of the celebrated icon in his nineties, we see Attenborough ensconced in jungles, deserts and forests, by waterfalls and volcanoes and oceans, we watch him point and gesture at whatever he is about to expound upon, and we hear his sharp intakes of breath – but we never hear him speak.

Vardo’s ingeniously simple technique has produced a never-before-seen vision of the much-loved broadcaster. This vision is one in which Attenborough is stripped of his distinctive voice, his persuasive language and his encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world. What I find interesting and significant about this is that the very qualities that Vardo has suppressed in Attenborough – voice, language, knowledge – are the same qualities that, in western cultures, have often been considered the hallmarks of human superiority, the attributes setting us apart from (and above) other creatures. By focusing, instead, on the intake of air into Attenborough’s lungs, Vardo foregrounds the fact that he – and by extension, all humans – is a fleshy, mortal, breathing body, one that is deeply connected to its surroundings and caught up in complex webs of interdependence and reciprocity with the elements, and with other forms of life.

This essay, then, considers the contrast that Vardo creates in Orders of magnitude between voice, speech and language on the one hand, and breath, air and the body on the other. Furthermore, the essay considers how this contrast constitutes a challenge to long-held western notions of human superiority, difference and separation from the natural world.

David Attenborough and the tree of life
As a child, it was the BBC Natural History Unit’s television documentaries, narrated and often written by David Attenborough, that first introduced me to the surprising, inventive and beautiful adaptations to be found in the natural world. I can remember marvelling at the astonishingly varied repertoire of the superb lyrebird, at the way some orchids disguise themselves as wasps, and at the massive fungal farms cultivated by leafcutter ants. My experience watching Attenborough’s nature documentaries as a child made me feel, for the first time, something I have felt many times since: a sense of wonder, of head-shaking incredulity, that all of these extravagant displays, these elaborate disguises, these ingenious adaptations to particular environments and precise co-evolutions between different species, could emerge automatically through mechanisms of evolution and ecology, without having been designed. While these childhood experiences of watching Attenborough’s documentaries did not provide me with much more than a surface understanding of evolutionary and ecological processes, the point, for me, was simply to be amazed and surprised to discover that such things can exist in nature: to follow Attenborough, enraptured, as he pointed out one wonder after another on the tree of life.

The tree of life is, in a sense, the structuring principle for Attenborough’s major contribution to popular natural history: his Life series, a sequence of nine natural history documentary programs broadcast between 1979 and 2008, which together comprise a comprehensive study of life on earth. The early programs survey evolution, environmental adaptation and animal behaviour, while the later instalments focus more specifically on plants, birds, mammals, invertebrates, reptiles and amphibians. Over the course of this ambitious, decades-long project, and more so since it concluded, Attenborough has also narrated (and sometimes helped to write) other landmark or blockbuster BBC Natural History Unit programs, including the Planet series, from The Blue Planet (2001) to Planet Earth III (2023). These more recent programs are arguably less concerned with giving viewers broad overviews of evolution, environmental adaptations or animal behaviour – after all, Attenborough’s Life series has already done this comprehensively – but rather seem to be motivated by the challenge of presenting scenes and sequences that are more and more visually spectacular, which have never been filmed before and which make use of the very latest filming techniques, technologies and resolutions.

Over the years, David Attenborough’s public persona has become an integral part of the experience of watching the various programs he has narrated. It almost goes without saying that a large part of this persona is bound up with Attenborough’s iconic and distinctive voice. Patrician, educated, slightly paternal but always gentle, it is a voice which carries an air of authority, but lightly, with humility. Helen Wheatley describes the ‘whispery reverent timbre’²Helen Wheatley, ‘The limits of television?: Natural history programming and the transformation of public service broadcasting’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 7, no. 3, 2004, p. 329. of Attenborough’s voice, while Frances Bonner offers a brief history of how it has changed over the decades:

His voice is often quite other than the hoarse whisper so beloved by impressionists. It becomes obvious that it drops from reasonably high in the 1950s quite slowly up to 1980. The whisper adopted in order not to alarm the gorillas was not carried through into the rest of Life on Earth, though it now sounds continuous with his present voice overs.³Frances Bonner, ‘A circumscribed (natural) history: British television celebrates David Attenborough’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 40, no. 4, 2020, pp. 885–86.

Here Bonner refers to a celebrated scene from Life on Earth (1979) in which Attenborough unexpectedly comes face to face with an adult female mountain gorilla in Rwanda (which Vardo has included in her video work). Belinda Smaill, rather than describing the voice itself, explains the part it plays in public perceptions of Attenborough:

[Attenborough’s] voice and his occasional onscreen appearances are central to how [his embodiment of scientific authority] has become familiar to viewers. They perpetuate his authorial signature and its alignment with trusted analytical knowledge and the consistent access he has offered to the spectacularization of nonhuman life over the decades.⁴Belinda Smaill, Regarding Life: Animals and the Documentary Moving Image, SUNY Press, 2016, p. 107.

The fact that Attenborough’s voice is so trusted and recognisable perhaps explains why several websites, as reported in November 2024, have cloned his voice using artificial intelligence, which Attenborough has stated he is ‘profoundly disturbed’⁵BBC News, ‘Sir David Attenborough says AI clone of his voice is “disturbing”’, 18 Nov. 2024, YouTube video, accessed 20 Nov. 2024 by.

Whispery, reverent, imbued with scientific authority – this is the voice that Vardo, in Orders of magnitude, has rendered silent. But an aspect of Attenborough’s public persona that is perceptible within Vardo’s work, because it resides not only in his voice but also in his physicality and breath, is Attenborough’s bristling, restless enthusiasm, still undiminished in his nineties. The word ‘enthusiasm’ comes from the ancient Greek enthousiasmós, from énthous, meaning ‘possessed by a god’ or ‘inspired’. Enthusiasm as possession suggests a kind of madness or desire, the body being transfixed or enchanted, invaded and occupied by another entity. What possesses Attenborough in his on-screen narrations? What is the thing that causes his eyes to sparkle and his breath to quicken, the thing that in the famous sequence from Life on Earth draws him to softly, madly creep closer and closer to a Rwandan mountain gorilla? It is life, all life: plants and insects and bugs and slugs, mammals and reptiles and birds, lichen and mould and slime, fungi which burst and bloom from the soil, or out of the head of an insect driven mad by spores. The entire Life series could be considered an extension into the world of Attenborough’s enthusiasm for life, his curiosity about the world, what the biologist Edward O. Wilson refers to as biophilia, the human ‘tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes’.⁶Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia, Harvard University Press, 1984, p. 1. In the Life series, the flow of each episode’s story, the route that the episode takes us through its argument, from one continent to another, derives its structure from the structure of Attenborough’s enthusiasm.

Of course, it goes without saying that not all human engagement with the natural world is characterised by enthusiasm, curiosity and biophilia. Throughout history, groups of humans have also been cruel, fearful, exploitative or callously indifferent to the natural world. How can an analysis of Attenborough’s natural history programs account for the ways in which the human species is changing the planet, especially those changes that produce desecrated landscapes and oceans, escalating extinctions, collapsing biodiversity and changing climates? Over the course of Attenborough’s on-screen career, the more harmful influences of the human species on the planet have been acknowledged more and more – particularly in the later programs in the Life series and in the programs that have followed. However, when one considers Attenborough’s on-screen career as a whole – which is exactly what Vardo invites us to do while viewing her work – it is apparent that its main preoccupation has been non-human life, life without humans. Other humans are rarely seen. In episode after episode, this man who is almost always dressed in tan pants and a blue shirt, with a shock of first blonde and later silver hair, creeps and whispers and wanders through landscapes seemingly devoid of other people, through forests and deserts, mountains and plains, from one continent to another in the space of a moment, always seemingly alone: the film crew and production companies that follow Attenborough on these wanderings are very rarely referred to or shown on-screen. Watching Orders of magnitude, I am reminded that for much of his on-screen career, it has sometimes seemed as if Attenborough wanders through a world absent of other humans, as if he is the last person on earth – or the first, an Adam in a paradise, a planet-wide garden, naming all the animals.

The power of naming and the anthropological machine
These echoes of Adam’s first act within Attenborough’s on-screen appearances – calling out each creature’s name, capturing its essence in language – are precisely what Vardo strips away in her video work. That mythic act of naming is depicted in an engraving acquired by the NGV in 2017: William Blake’s Adam naming the beasts, 1802. Adam is situated at the centre of the frame, seated serenely at the foot of a tree. Crowded around him, animals wait obediently to receive their respective designations: lion, horse, serpent, peacock, rooster, sheep, cow. Adam’s right hand rests on the lion’s mane as it lies in peaceful repose at his feet; the sheep, with no trace of fear, calmly munches at the grass a little way off.

This image of Edenic tranquillity is ineluctably anthropocentric: it positions Adam at the literal centre of Creation, exerting a benevolent mastery over all other creatures through the act of naming them. The almost total lack of conflict or tension in the scene, only partially broken by the serpent’s portentously mischievous expression, means there is never any question that these creatures will submit to Adam’s imposition of a name, to being gathered up and organised into a system of knowledge. There is certainly no sense that the creatures could name themselves, or have voices of their own – the human, whether it be Adam or Attenborough, is the one who names, who speaks, who designates meaning.

In his landmark essay ‘Nature and Silence’ (1992), Christopher Manes argues that ‘nature is silent in [western] culture (and in literate societies generally) in the sense that the status of being a speaking subject is jealously guarded as an exclusively human prerogative’.⁷Christopher Manes, ‘Nature and silence’, Environmental Ethics, vol. 14, no. 4, 1992, p. 339. Manes contrasts this silence with animist perspectives from other cultures, in which ‘not just people, but also animals, plants, and even “inert” entities such as stones and rivers are perceived as being articulate and at times intelligible subjects’.⁸ibid. p. 340. He notes that in ‘modern technological society, animistic reflexes linger on in attenuated form’,⁹ibid. p. 342. such as the animal mascots of sports teams, the machines we shout at when they malfunction and the talking animals in fairytales.

While these animistic traces and remnants remain extant, Manes asserts that the silence of nature dates back to the medieval period, when ‘animism as a coherent system’¹⁰ibid. p. 343. for knowing and relating to the world began breaking down within western cultures. The advent of literacy, alphabetic writing and religious forms of textual interpretation or exegesis gave rise to the notion that meaning is to be found in the spoken word or the written text – in language, not in the world. This, in turn, gave rise to the concept of the Book of Nature: just as religious scripture contained hidden truths to be uncovered through exegesis, so forms in the natural world were expressive or indicative of divine wisdom. According to Manes, the Book of Nature ‘established God as a transcendental subject speaking through natural entities, which, like words on a page, had a symbolic meaning, but no autonomous voice’.¹¹ibid. p. 345. From a certain angle, one can see traces of this idea in Attenborough’s Life series of programs – his grand overview of life is a kind of Darwinian Book of Nature, in which animals and plants are used to illustrate or demonstrate the mechanisms of evolution. By rendering him silent in Orders of magnitude, Vardo makes Attenborough close the Book of Nature.

In ‘Nature and Silence’ Manes also explores western concepts of the scala naturae or Great Chain of Being, the ordering of Creation into a hierarchical structure ranging from inanimate minerals up through plants and animals to the divine, placing humanity above animals but just below angels.

This hierarchical ordering and separating of beings – which sets humans apart from and above other creatures – persists through the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods. A version of it can be found in the work of Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus who, in his Systema Naturae (1735), separated nature into the Animal Kingdom (Regnum Animale), the Plant Kingdom (Regnum Vegetabile) and the Mineral Kingdom (Regnum Lapideum), a division which survives in present-day conceptions of nature.

Linnaeus is considered the father of modern taxonomy because he developed a classification system that ranked and divided organisms by kingdom, class, order, genus and species, a version of which is still used today. Again, there are traces of this idea in Attenborough’s Life series. The later, more specialised programs – The Life of Birds (1998), The Life of Mammals (2002), Life in the Undergrowth (2005) looking at insects and invertebrates, and Life in Cold Blood (2008) looking at reptiles and amphibians – broadly correspond to the Linnaean division of animals into separate classes. And once more, by depriving Attenborough of his voice in Orders of magnitude, Vardo ensures that this system of ranking and dividing life forms melts away into thin air.

Linnaeus also formalised and popularised the use of binominal nomenclature, a naming system with two parts (genus and species) that gives us the names of species like Homo sapiens, Tyrannosaurus rex and Attenborosaurus conybeari, a plesiosaur from the early Jurassic era and Attenborough’s favourite out of the many life forms named after him.¹² Abby Ohlheiser, ‘Why Sir David Attenborough, at 89, can’t and won’t stop documenting nature’, The Washington Post, 13 May 2015, accessed 23 Nov. 2023. In ‘The power of naming: A technology for mastering the world’, Cecilia Sjöholm describes the system of taxonomy and nomenclature that Linnaeus developed as an ‘infinite principle of naming’, a ‘technology of naming’.¹³Cecilia Sjöholm, ‘The power of naming: A technology for mastering the world’, Cabinet Magazine, no. 65, 2017, accessed 28 Oct. 2023. This naming machine, this apparatus for naming, knowing, ordering, ranking, dividing and ultimately conquering Creation, is the apotheosis of Adam’s original act of naming as a form of mastery.

Speculative fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin has imagined a coda to the Eden myth, in a short story titled ‘She Unnames Them’ (1990). Eve chooses to release the animals from the names they have been given, from ‘all the Linnaean qualifiers that had trailed along behind them for two hundred years like tin cans tied to a tail’.¹⁴Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘She Unnames Them’, in Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, Roc Books, 1990, p. 235. Following the dissolution of this imposed taxonomy, Eve relinquishes her own name to Adam and then abandons him. From the perspective of Eve, Le Guin writes that:

The insects parted with their names in vast clouds and swarms of ephemeral syllables buzzing and stinging and humming and flitting and crawling and tunnelling away.

As for the fish of the sea, their names dispersed from them in silence throughout the oceans like faint, dark blurs of cuttlefish ink, and drifted off on the currents without a trace.

None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier.¹⁵ibid.

In describing names as a barrier, Le Guin seems to concur with Manes’s arguments in ‘Nature and Silence’. The Edenic myth of humanity’s mastery over nature, the notion that other creatures are mere illustrations in a book of divine wisdom, the hierarchical cosmologies and knowledge systems that place humans higher than all other life: the ways western cultures have spoken and thought about nature since the medieval period have produced a profound detachment from the natural world, to the extent that other creatures cannot be seen or heard as articulate and expressive subjects. The Australian ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood refers to this detachment as the ‘hyper-separation of human and animal natures’,¹⁶ Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, Routledge, 2002, p. 57. one of the ‘dominant illusions’¹⁷ibid p. 2. that has led to the current ecological crisis. Along similar lines, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben claims that ‘determining the border between human and animal [is the] fundamental meta-physico-political operation’ within western philosophy, ‘in which alone something like “man” can be decided upon and produced’.¹⁸Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell, Stanford University Press, 2004, p. 21. In other words, the human is defined and understood in western cultures by excluding the animal. Agamben refers to this meta-physico-political operation as the ‘anthropological machine’.¹⁹ibid. p. 29.

To challenge the anthropological machine – the long-held, pervasive and deeply harmful notion that humans are separate, superior and sovereign over nature, that we are the only creature that is articulate and intelligible – we must, according to Manes, ‘contemplate not only learning a new ethics, but a new language free from the directionalities of humanism, a language that incorporates a decentered, postmodern, post-humanist perspective. In short, we require the language of ecological humility.’²⁰ Manes, p. 342. In Le Guin’s story, Eve seems to have found a way to bring the anthropological machine to a halt, to pull down the barrier separating humans from other creatures – but rather than develop a new language or give the animals new names, she relinquishes language all together, she unnames them. And one could argue that Vardo performs a similar act of unnaming in Orders of magnitude, by suppressing the distinctive, iconic and authoritative voice of Sir David Attenborough. Le Guin places Eve within a fictional world where, unlike the real world, it is possible to simply and instantaneously undo all the naming, ordering, ranking and dividing of earthly life. Similarly, Vardo places Attenborough within a filmic world where names, words and systems of language and knowledge are absent, having been quite literally cut out of the frame.

The forgetting of air and the breath of life
If this world that Vardo creates is defined by the absence of audible speech, then it is equally defined by the presence of something invisible, something that is always present but never seen: the air that we pull into ourselves, that we heave into our lungs, in order to breathe, to live, to move, to speak. Before exploring some of the meanings that have been attached to the air and to breath, I want to emphasise that while this essay explores the symbolic contrasts between voice and breath suggested by Vardo’s work, voice and breath are in no way opposed: they are totally intertwined. Breath is, after all, the fuel of voice. It is by breathing that one activates the vibrations of the human larynx or voice box, which (in bodies where it visibly protrudes) is known as the ‘Adam’s apple’ – another echo of Eden. Specifically, the vibrations of the vocal cords are almost always activated by breathing out, as can be discovered by trying to say one’s name while breathing in. Speaking by pushing air out of the lungs is known in phonetics as a pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism (pulmonic: from the lungs; egressive: pushed out).²¹Richard Ogden, An Introduction to English Phonetics, Edinburgh University Press, 2009, p. 8. In all known languages, speaking while breathing out is the norm: Peter Ladefoged and Keith Johnson assert in A Course in Phonetics that ‘air coming out of the lungs is the source of power in nearly all speech sounds’.²²Peter Ladefoged & Keith Johnson, A Course in Phonetics, 7th edn, Cengage, 2015, p. 144 It is this characteristic of human speech and human physiology – that we almost always speak while breathing out – which Vardo exploits in Orders of magnitude. By editing out Attenborough’s exhalations, by placing him within a filmic world where to breathe is only to breathe in, Vardo provides no opportunity for him to speak.

Furthermore, by compiling this chronological assemblage of Attenborough’s inhalations, Vardo creates a world which is not punctuated by many of the rhythms that, in the real world, punctuate and define human existence. In the world suggested by Vardo’s video work, geographic distances appear negligible (as they do in the original programs), but time does seem to pass – as evidenced by Attenborough’s visible ageing. And yet this is a world with no rhythmic passing of day into night, no turning of the seasons and, crucially, no rhythmic oscillation between inhaling and exhaling. The rhythm of breathing in and breathing out is one which permeates our lives from the moment we take our first breath as a newborn – and the first breath is always a breathing in – and continues ceaselessly, if not always regularly, until our last ragged gasp, our final breath, which is always a breathing out. Air is the invisible medium that we, as terrestrial creatures, are immersed in as surely as fish are immersed in water. Air surrounds us, it permeates our existence from the moment of birth to the moment of death, we draw it into ourselves and push it back out again, we depend upon it to live, to move, to speak – and yet it remains invisible, intangible, formless, without substance.

According to French philosopher Luce Irigaray, the invisibility and intangibility of the air has, for several centuries, allowed it to be somewhat forgotten or neglected within western philosophical traditions. In her book The Forgetting of Air (1983), Irigaray writes that ‘Air does not show itself. As such, it escapes appearing as (a) being. It allows itself to be forgotten . . . Air remains the unthought resource of being.’²³Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air, trans. Mary Beth Mader, The Athlone Press, 1999, p. 14. In Orders of magnitude, Vardo constructs a version of Attenborough that does not speak but only sucks air into his lungs, again and again and again, and in doing so, she provides her audience with an opportunity to remember the air, to think that which has been unthought.

In the four decades since Irigaray wrote those words, more and more people across the globe have been forced to reckon with the consequences of the forgetting of air, the devaluing of air, as carbon dioxide released into the air by human activity changes the earth’s atmosphere and climate in ways that, for many, are now too visible and too tangible to be ignored or denied. The airborne Covid-19 pandemic has also forced millions to reckon with how intimately we depend on the air that surrounds us. In 2023, in a special issue of the journal SubStance titled ‘Breathe’, Irigaray returns to the subject of air and breath, writing that ‘breathing is the most crucial key component of our relation to ourselves, to the other(s) and to the world. And it is a pity that we only discover that because our breathing is now more than ever put in danger.’²⁴Luce Irigaray, ‘The most crucial gesture for a living being’, SubStance, vol. 52, no. 1, 2023, p. 207.

Such dangers, however, are not evenly distributed. In the midst of the global Covid-19 pandemic, the desperate pleas of ‘I can’t breathe’ uttered by George Floyd, an unarmed Black man who was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, highlighted the systemic inequalities that threaten the right to breathe. Through the global outrage and protests against racial injustice sparked by Floyd’s death, his words – his last words – resonated far beyond the context of his murder, becoming a rallying cry for social change. In the aforementioned issue of SubStance, Françoise Vergès writes that,

When across the world, during 2020, people were shouting in many languages, ‘I can’t breathe’ using all their breath, they were, by the thousands, making their voices heard, rupturing the silencing of racism. ‘I can’t breathe’ became a breathing cry. Breathing became resistance.²⁵ Françoise Vergès, ‘At the beginning, there was the mask’, SubStance, vol. 52, no. 1, 2023, p. 55.

Earlier in this essay, I explored how voice, speech and systems of language and knowledge have been used to define, to separate, to hierarchise, to silence and to exert mastery and dominance. But this global cry for racial justice is a reminder that the voice can be used to resist forms of mastery and dominance – that we can fill up our lungs with air in order to shout out truth to power. The lasting power of Floyd’s final words also serves as a reminder that the forgetting and devaluing of air can take many forms. As mentioned, it can manifest as a blithe disregard for the ways in which human activity is changing the atmosphere and climate. But it can also manifest as a callous contempt for the rights of others to breathe freely. As Vergès argues, ‘the right to breathe is not a universal right. It is not equally distributed.’²⁶ibid. She goes on to say, ‘Death by suffocation is not only caused by police violence, political repression and censorship . . . Exploitation is suffocation, colonialism is asphyxiation, imperialism is strangulation, racism is snuffing.’²⁷ibid. In this way, Vergès links the fight for racial justice with the fight for environmental or interspecies justice, through the common thread of the forgetting and devaluing of air.

For the air to have been forgotten within western philosophical and cultural traditions, it stands to reason that it had to have been known or theorised at some earlier point within said traditions. Indeed, Irigaray begins The Forgetting of Air by stating that her aim is to return ‘to the world of the Pre-Socratics’.²⁸ Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air, p. 2. This could be taken to refer to, among others, the Pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximenes of Miletus. Anaximenes believed that air was the arche, the source and underlying substance of all things: ‘As our soul . . . which is air, controls us, so do breath and air encompass the whole world-order.’²⁹ Aetius, quoted in Daniel W. Graham, Explaining the Cosmos: The Ionian Tradition of Scientific Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 47. Remnants of this ancient connection – between air, wind and breath, on the one hand, and mind, soul and spirit on the other – persist today, in the etymology of several words in English and other languages derived from Latin and ancient Greek. The words ‘psyche’ and ‘psychology’ come from the ancient Greek word psȳchē, referring to mind and spirit but also breath. The words ‘animal’, ‘animation’ and ‘animism’ come from the Latin word anima, meaning soul, life force, animating principle, as well as air, breath or a gust of wind (anima is also related to the ancient Greek word ánemos, a wind or gale). Finally, the words ‘spirit’, ‘inspiration’ and ‘respiration’ come from the Latin word spīritus, signifying air, breath or a light breeze, as well as spirit, mind or vitality. It could be supposed that the very qualities of the air that, according to Irigaray, have allowed it to be forgotten and devalued in western cultures – its invisibility, its intangibility – enabled, at an earlier time, these deep associations between the breath and the spirit. Like the breath, the mind or spirit or life force is invisible, intangible, formless, without substance, and yet like breath, it is ostensibly what animates us, what makes us alive.

Traces of this old connection between breath and spirit can be found not only in the languages of western cultures but also in its archetypal Judeo-Christian myths. If the on-screen career of David Attenborough, seemingly alone, naming all the animals, recalls the first act of Adam in the garden of Eden, then the vision of Attenborough that Vardo presents in Orders of magnitude – drawing air into his lungs, over and over – recalls an earlier episode in the Eden myth: God’s creation of Adam on the sixth day. This scene is depicted in a sixteenth-century engraving held by the NGV: Crispijn de Passe the Elder’s The creation of Adam, 1580–1600, the first in a series of six circular engravings titled The History of Adam and Eve. In contrast with Blake’s aforementioned Adam naming the beasts it is God, rather than Adam, situated in the centre of the frame. His cloak billowing behind Him as if caught in a strong gust of wind, God reaches down to lift and hold Adam, who seems to have been in a reclining pose under a tree. The faces of Adam and God are locked onto one another; Adam’s mouth is open – much like Attenborough’s is for the duration of Vardo’s video work.

Unlike Michelangelo’s more famous rendition on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in which God bestows the spark of life to Adam through their outstretched fingertips, this version is slightly more faithful to the Biblical story. The circular inscription in Latin that borders the scene is from the second book of Genesis: ‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul’ (Genesis 2:7).³⁰Robert Carroll & Stephen Prickett (eds), The Bible: Authorized King James Version, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 2. Rather than the nostrils, Adam’s open mouth in de Passe the Elder’s rendition suggests a somewhat more intimate imparting of the breath of life – spirit, sentience and vitality passing from the lungs and mouth of the Creator directly into the mouth and lungs of the lifeless figure beneath him, like a divine form of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (also known as the kiss of life). This Biblical notion of the breath of life, and the links between breath and spirit in languages derived from Latin and ancient Greek, suggest that within the history of western cultures, there have been times when the air was imbued with a degree of sentience, vitality and expressivity, while notions of soul or mind were imbued with some of the openness and fluidity of a swirling breeze. In this way, we can connect the forgetting of air with Manes’ ideas about the silence of nature, and Agamben’s concept of the anthropological machine. As soon as western notions of soul or mind were locked up inside human bodies – as soon as humans became the only entities that could be considered sentient and expressive – the air, along with the rest of nature, was rendered lifeless and mechanical, mere empty space.

While western cultures have arguably devalued and disregarded the air for centuries, many cultures around the world have not. In The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (1997), American ecologist and philosopher David Abram asserts – in a chapter titled ‘The forgetting and remembering of the air’ – that ‘nothing is more common to the diverse Indigenous cultures of the earth than a recognition of the air, the wind, and the breath, as aspects of a singularly sacred power’.³¹David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, Vintage Books, 1997, p. 226. To elaborate, Abram draws on the words of First Nations elders, teachers and shamans across North America, before focusing in detail on the concept of nilch’i – the Holy Wind – belonging to the Diné or Navajo people of the Southwestern United States. Abram writes that for Diné or Navajo people, nilch’i ‘refers to the whole body of the air or the atmosphere, including the air when in motion, as well as the air that swirls within us as we breathe . . . Nilch’i suffuses all of nature, and is that which grants life, movement, speech, and awareness to all beings.’³²ibid. p. 230. Nilch’i is a ‘single, unified phenomenon’ made up of a ‘plurality of partial Winds’, including nilch’i hwii’ siziinii, the ‘Wind within one’.³³ibid. Unlike the separate and autonomous psyche or soul of western cultures, the ‘Wind within one’ is ‘simply that part of the enveloping Air that circulates within, through, and around one’s particular body; hence, one’s own intelligence is assumed, from the start, to be entirely participant with the swirling psyche of the land.’³⁴ibid. p. 237. Abram describes nilch’i as comprising many interrelated Winds that shape a person from conception through birth and throughout life. Nilch’i holds the power of language since, as previously mentioned, it is breath, pushed out of the lungs, which fuels the voice. Nilch’i also includes messenger Winds associated with thought and communication, and it can be benevolent or malevolent, faithful or capricious. As an active participant within the greater nilch’i, a person can channel their interior Wind through ritual, speech and song in order to influence their surroundings, using their outward breath to impart what is known as hozho, a condition of harmony, peace and beauty, and then breathing the hozho they have created back into themselves. This practice, according to Abram, demonstrates:

The reciprocal, even circular character of the relation between the [Diné or] Navajo people and the animate cosmos that enfolds and includes them. They are not passive with respect to the other powers of this world, or rather they are both passive and active, inhaling and exhaling, receiving the nourishment of the diverse beings and actively nourishing them in turn.³⁵ibid. p. 236.

Abram’s account of nilch’i offers a powerful way of thinking about air not as an empty medium that separates discrete beings, but as that which continually binds them together. Air, in this understanding, is not something that merely surrounds life, but something that moves through it, animates it, and renders it fundamentally relational. To breathe is not simply to sustain oneself as an isolated organism; it is to participate in a shared, circulating substance that is always already passing between bodies, landscapes and species. Breath becomes a sign of entanglement rather than individuality, a reminder that the boundaries we imagine between self and world are porous, provisional and constantly being crossed.

This perspective stands in stark contrast to western philosophical traditions that conceive of the human subject as autonomous, self-contained and sharply distinguished from its environment. In Abram’s account, there is no clear division between interior and exterior, between mind and world, or between human and non-human life. The ‘Wind within one’ is inseparable from the greater movement of air that courses through forests, plains and skies; intelligence and awareness are not locked inside the skull but are distributed across a living, breathing landscape. To breathe, then, is to acknowledge one’s participation in a vast, animate system of exchange, one in which agency, vitality and meaning are shared rather than possessed.

Seen in this way, air becomes a compelling figure for ecological interdependence. It enacts materially what ecological thinking insists upon conceptually: that no being exists in isolation, that life is sustained through continuous processes of mutual exchange, and that harm done to the shared medium of air reverberates across bodies and species alike. Breathing exposes the fiction of absolute separation. Each inhalation draws the world into the body; each exhalation returns the body to the world. Air thus figures our entanglement not as an abstract ethical principle, but as a lived, physiological reality, one that unfolds with every breath we take.

Conclusion
Vardo’s Orders of magnitude can be understood as a quiet but insistent visualisation of precisely this entanglement. By focusing exclusively on Attenborough’s inhalations, the work draws attention to the shared medium that Abram describes: the air that moves between bodies, landscapes and species, binding them together in a continuous circuit of exchange. Attenborough’s breath is never his alone. Each intake of air carries with it traces of distant forests, oceans, soils and atmospheres; it is the same air exhaled moments earlier by plants, animals and microorganisms elsewhere on the planet. In isolating the act of breathing from the act of speaking, Vardo foregrounds the material condition that precedes and exceeds language: the elemental exchange that sustains all terrestrial life.

Orders of magnitude thus offers a counter-image to the anthropological machine described earlier in this essay. Where the anthropological machine works to separate humans from animals, culture from nature, and speech from matter, Vardo’s work collapses these distinctions by returning us to the most basic and shared condition of existence. Attenborough, the authoritative narrator of the natural world, is rendered momentarily indistinguishable from the environments he inhabits on-screen. His body becomes a site of passage rather than command, a conduit through which the air of jungles, deserts and oceans flows. In this sense, the work subtly repositions Attenborough not as the sovereign voice of nature, but as one breathing body among many, embedded within the same atmospheric system as the creatures he has spent a lifetime describing.

Moreover, the absence of exhalation in Vardo’s work – the fact that we never hear Attenborough speak – lends Orders of magnitude a strange ethical charge. The repeated inhalations without release evoke a suspended state, as if the work itself were holding its breath. This suspension can be read as an invitation to the viewer: a call to attend, to listen, and to become conscious of one’s own breathing body in relation to the images on-screen. In aligning Attenborough’s breath with the landscapes he moves through, Orders of magnitude renders visible what is usually imperceptible: the atmospheric commons that connects all life. In doing so, Vardo’s work echoes Abram’s insistence that air is not merely the background of perception, but the very medium through which life becomes mutually intelligible and profoundly intertwined.

Dr David Haworth explored depictions of non-human artfulness for his PhD, and has published on such topics as the ‘feral’ or animal-reared child, illusion and mimicry in nature and art, the cultural histories of the black swan, and the shifting status of the Galápagos tortoise.

Notes