“A Cycle of Air: Site 1 (2024)” by Ross Manning, Anna Tweedale

UV Suite: Airborne . 2024 (detail) Nylon parachute

Title:

A Cycle of Air: Site 1 (2024)

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Creation Year:

2024

Medium:

Nylon parachute

Artist Statement:

A Cycle of Air is situated with/in the emergent future that is now, when living collectively in the interior atmospheres of buildings might offer, unevenly and interchangeably, breathable air compatible with life and/or health- and life-threatening risk. The work sets multiple art interventions into intra-active relation with the spatial configuration and conditions of the building/site; the audience’s sensing and breathing bodies; and, the composition of gases, volatile organic compounds, aerosol particulates and airborne microbes that comprise the resulting air. Catalysed by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and escalating wildfire events, and now haunted by the spectre of ongoing pandemics of both emergent and resurgent respiratory pathogens, A Cycle of Air challenges the audience to sit with questions of how humans might ethically live and breathe with/in more-than-human ecologies amidst unstable atmospheric and biopolitical conditions. The work is situated in dialogue with emerging research informing the complex aesthetic, technical, chemical, biological, political, and behavioural entanglements that characterise our precarious human-building-air relations.

Other Information:

Acknowledgements:
A Cycle of Air: Site 1 was created by Anna Tweeddale and Ross Manning with support from the QUT Art Museum. Anna Tweeddale is further supported by the University of Newcastle. The exhibited work is developed out of research-based creative practice explorations supported by an ANAT Synapse Residency (2023) during which the artist-researchers worked in generous conversation with internationally renowned aerosol scientist and expert in air quality, Distinguished Professor Lidia Morawska. The residency was co-hosted at the Queensland University of Technology by the Human Building Interaction research group (including access to workshop space in the School of Architecture and Built Environment) and the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health (School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences).