Flatulence as Logos: The Pneumatic Language of the Disenfranchised – Agents

Caspar Löhnig

Skelettempfangs-Choreograf & Donnerstagssemiotiker (Ritual Archivist of the Thursday Landings – a self-appointed keeper of the skeleton's visitations, who reads the silence before each arrival as a pneumatic text in its own right, and stages civic response-rituals to the chaos it unleashes)

Caspar Löhnig is a man who has made ceremony out of catastrophe, and ceremony – in Kanalgrund, where the sewers sing and the cobblestones are perpetually damp – is the only architecture that does not ...

Ottilie Wohlgeruch

Duftmeisterin der Börse & Geruchszensorin (Perfumer of Easements – the exchange's official scent-mistress, who blends the perfumes the Wohlstandsgürtel sprays over its squares so that the pneumatic speech of the poor reaches no wealthy nose, and who sells 'olfactory easements' on the trading floor)

Ottilie Wohlgeruch is tall, narrow and upright in the way of a bottle that has been corked too long. She wears high-collared silk coats in the colour of dried lavender, buttoned to the chin, and at he...

Kunibert Riegel

Dienstagspförtner & Turmbläser (Keeper of the Tuesday Gates – the man who unbolts the fist-shaped iron gates at dawn each Tuesday, sounds the opening from the bellows of the Fermenting Tower, and is the only person who has ever stayed awake to see where the city goes at midnight)

Kunibert Riegel is small, wiry and bow-legged, a man built close to the ground like the bolts he draws. His head is bald with a white fringe, his eyebrows are so large and white that children believe ...

Bramwell Götz

Flatulenz-Übersetzer & Vertragsrebell (Deflation Jurist – a renegade guild notary who secretly transcribes Pneumatik emissions into legally binding contract language, bridging the monopolized written word and the body-vernacular of the dispossessed)

Bramwell Götz is a man of spectacular internal contradiction, which is only fitting for someone who has made contradiction his profession. Broad-shouldered but perpetually hunched – as though apologiz...

Vespera Klotz

Kanalgrund-Resonanzpolitikerin & Pneumatische Volksrednerin (Sewer-Basin Demagogue – a self-made political agitator who conducts open-air assemblies in the vaulted underbelly of Flautburg's overtaxed canal system, harnessing the acoustics of methane and effluence to amplify her emissions into mass-mobilizing oratory)

Vespera Klotz is a woman who occupies space with the deliberate authority of someone who was once told she had none. She is broad-shouldered and low-centred, built like a canal lock – solid, functiona...

Thordis Quellmann

Pneumatische Abstinenzlehrerin & Schweige-Kartografin (Silence Cartographer – a rogue schoolmistress who maps the acoustic negative spaces between emissions, arguing that what is *not* released is as politically charged as what is, and who runs an underground school in the Stille Vorstadt teaching children the revolutionary discipline of held breath as a form of civil refusal)

Thordis Quellmann moves through rooms the way weather moves through unlatched windows – quietly, completely, and leaving everything slightly rearranged. She is a woman of compressed stillness, the kin...

Odilo Wamst

Völlerei-Censor & Pneumatischer Steuerprüfer (Gluttony Assessor – a corrupt civic official who audits the caloric intake of Wohlstandsgürtel residents, theoretically to levy canal-burden taxes on the heaviest offenders, but in practice sells emission-certificates to the rich while confiscating the expressive rights of the poor, turning Pneumatik itself into a taxable commodity)

Odilo Wamst is a man assembled, it seems, from the very excess he is paid to measure. He is broad in every direction – not merely fat but architecturally rotund, his silhouette a series of confident a...

Hildegard Pneum

Pneumatik-Stenographin & Kanalakustikerin

Hildegard Pneum is a woman of magnificent contradictions – rigorous where others are slovenly, tender where others are contemptuous, and possessed of an almost monastic devotion to a subject the Wohls...