Architecture at the Edge present
The Air we Breath by ;a place of their own.
Installation of architecture /art object at Grattan Beach, Galway City.
Unfortunately this event has had to be postponed due to current COVID-19 restrictions. Rescheduled dates for the event will be announced as soon as possible.
the air we breathe by Paula McCloskey and Sam Vardy,; a place of their own was commissioned by AATE for the Boundaries Commissions at the Architecture at the Edge Festival 2020.
Background: The air we breathe as public realm
There is perhaps no more public a realm than the air we breathe. Covid-19 has shown this through the challenges of the pandemic, and the inequalities and divisions that it has established. While the public realm might be thought of as spaces that are free and open to everyone, they are often places that are regulated, privatised and establish defined and restrictive boundaries and inequalities.
How, then, might the air we breathe suggest alternative ways for us to think about the nature of the public realm?
It is estimated that humans breathe in between 100,000 and 1 million microbes each day, around 1000 different species of bacteria and fungi. So the air that we share (and our breath) leads us into ongoing, everyday patterns and processes of coexistence and co-production - what Lynn Marguilis called the ‘intimacy of strangers.’ This idea of co-production, or making-with, can also be called sympoiesis, and we suggest in this project that it could be an important way to think about the idea of the ‘public realm.’ Thinking about air therefore allows us to imagine a public realm of co-existence and making-with, a public realm that is made through our relationships to each other, to other life, and to the earth.
Sympoietic Intervention
A new audio-visual interactive spatial intervention in Galway, located on Grattan Beach at the boundary of land and sea (dependent on permissions), will fuse technical function (air quality monitoring) with affect (spatial, sculptural, film, audio) and generate a space for sympoietic encounters: collective screenings, discussions, and native Irish heather, supported by mycelium rhizomes, will attract butterflies and bees - at a crucial seasonal time for them, as they need to gather nectar as they pass from autumn to winter. The intervention will be connected (via mobile phone or radio) to the Mace Head station, which, like mycelium’s subterranean earthly version, is part of a global airborne radio network.
Sam and Paula
; a place, of their own. is the art + spatial research practice of Paula McCloskey and Sam Vardy. We work on transdisciplinary collaborative research projects that critically investigate entanglements of geopolitics, art, and climate crises. Through an intersectional approach and feminist praxis we create new imaginaries, and have co-produced site-specific performance, video, installations and publications concerning borders, wetlands, geopower, extraction, kinship and ecology.
TICKETS
This is a free outdoor installation and no tickets are required.
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