Materializing Air
Materializing Air
With Materializing Air, CURRENT explores the material qualities of air. As a complex mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and other gases, air forms an essential component of the biosphere and is indispensable for life on earth. As a physical substance, air has specific material properties: it transports sounds, odours, temperature and particles. Beyond this, air is manifest in the guise of foam, lets trees bend, cools cities and carries pollen, dust and other suspended particles. Air not only influences physical phenomena, but also social and political processes. In the digital age, air has attained a renewed significance as a carrier for immaterial data streams. The so-called “cloud” not only stands for digital storage and processing infrastructures but also functions as a metaphor for the decoupling of data from physical space. In reality, of course, this processing is bound to solid, spatial infrastructures – from data centers, to satellite networks, to wireless transmission frequencies circulating through the air.
Air is also a medium of exchange between human and non-human actors: It connects, separates, distributes and transforms. Plants use it for photosynthesis, insects for locomotion, fungal spores for dispersal. At the same time, environmental pollution, climate change and atmospheric transformations reveal the interplay between technological progress and ecological responsibility. What happens to air when it is deliberately designed or manipulated as a material? What role does air play in the perception and design of spaces and boundaries? How can artistic interventions make the invisibility of air and its influence on the environment and society tangible? And what new connections between human and non-human actors are created by examining air as a material?
The festival’s artistic interventions highlight the malleability and effects of air, in so making its social, political and ecological significance tangible. By combining sensory perception with critical reflection, the invisible environment and social dynamics of air are revealed.
Weitere Themen
Air as commons: Reclaim Air
Air as a Commons: Reclaim Air, highlights the notion of the commons and examines how air eludes territorial boundaries and individual appropriation. Widely considered a given and taken for granted — air — for example, receives far less attention in public discourse than water does. In the context of the climate crisis, growing environmental pollution and pervasive respiratory diseases, air has recently received greater social and political attention. Air is an omnipresent component of urban space, raising important questions of accessibility, distributive justice and responsibility: To what extent may air be understood as a public space? Who is responsible for the quality of this space? How does air quality affect human and non-human bodies and their well-being?
Examining air as a common good requires a transdisciplinary approach that combines ecological, socio-political and infrastructural dimensions. Emissions, pollution distribution and environmental injustice are closely linked to air quality, raising important questions about taking responsibility and social consequences. Architect Nerea Calvillo offers an intriguing example: from a queer-feminist perspective, she shows how air pollution is a social construct, rather than an objective fact. Using the example of pollen – a phenomenon that is both natural and potentially harmful to health – she illustrates how environmental problems are also an expression of social power relations. This ambivalence shows the inseparability of "natural" and "harmful".
Artistic proposals and reflections investigate the social and political implications of air, within the festival. They explore the connection to human and non-human bodies, deal with the use of fog in the context of war, offer breathing exercises, create a polyphony to fight for clean air and pursue a redefinition of air as a public space.
Driving, Dreaming, Drifting
With Driving, Dreaming, Drifting the influence of the automobile on the environment and urban architecture are brought into focus. Urban spaces themselves are changed by emissions, particulate matter and heat, whereby air becomes a political actor: as a carrier of pollutants, an indicator of socio-spatial inequality and a medium revealing the inequality of mobility.
Public space is typically conceived along binary thought patterns, as it is construed along mechanisms of exclusion and social hierarchies. The car symbolizes individualization, ownership and control. In this context, the term petromasculinity demonstrates the close intertwining of fossil fuels, patriarchal structures and masculine relations of dominance.
Through queer-feminist perspectives based on fluidity, corporeality, appropriation of patriarchal systems and ideas, as well as collective participation, the artistic contributions within the festival offer novel possibilities for more equitable and inclusive imaginaries of mobility and public space. Questions such as: Does the mobility transition merely reproduce existing dominant relations of masculinity, or does it create new possibilities for a more equitable design of urban space? To what extent may cars and air be considered conveyors of power, control and social inequality? The presented works of art encourage a critical examination of power relations in pursuit of developing alternative perspectives.