This project looks at air as an invisible but active boundary within the city. Although air appears free and continuous, its movement and quality are shaped by urban infrastructure, traffic, and environmental conditions. As a result, air is unevenly experienced across different spaces. Air pollution, in this sense, is not only a technical issue but a lived spatial condition tied to everyday exposure.

The project uses a white cotton handkerchief and microscopic imaging to register traces left by air over time. Rather than explaining pollution or making it immediately visible, the work focuses on how air slowly marks material surfaces. Through this process, air emerges as a boundary that operates quietly, through contact and duration.

This method relates to Clare Nattress’s "Smog Swatches," which use material surfaces to register pollution. However, my project does not collect samples or classify pollutants. Instead, it focuses on subtle transformations that remain invisible at the everyday scale. Tomas Saraceno’s statement "We do not all breathe the same air" informs the project conceptually, particularly his emphasis on uneven exposure. In my work, this inequality appears through micro-level material variation rather than large-scale visualisation. By avoiding direct data collection or visual explanation, the project adopts a slower and more indirect form of observation.

This year's Media Studies overarching theme of critical refusal manifests as refusal of assumptions rather than techniques. The project refuses to see air as a neutral background and instead understands it as something shaped by urban systems. It also resists instant visibility, allowing change to emerge slowly rather than being immediately represented. Finally, it moves away from fixed ideas of borders, focusing instead on boundaries that attach to surfaces and bodies. At the microscopic scale, the handkerchief reveals shifts in texture, density, and particle distribution. Here, the boundary of air is no longer located at the scale of the city, but at the point where body, material, and environment meet.