L'air pour l'air, Chicago

What is your relationship to the air around you?

We collaborated with artist Ana Prvački to debut a special performance during the second edition of the Chicago Architectural Biennial, Making New History. The project, titled L’air Pour L’air, explores the continued legacy of musicians as our cities’ atmospheres grow ever-more polluted.

With the abundant plant life of the Garfield Park Conservatory venue as inspiration, we worked together with Prvački to create an ensemble of air-filtering mesh enclosures. Designed to clear the air through breathing, these enclosures also highlight awareness of the most familiar of spaces, personal space. An ensemble from the Chicago Sinfonietta wear the part mask, part shelter structures; flute, trombone, saxophone and vocals–all instruments that require air to produce music.

Performing an original composition by Veronika Krausas, De Aere (concerning the air), the musicians “clean the air that produces the music”, their roving forms evocative of the exchange of air between plants and human inhabitants.

The installation and performance encourage its viewers to meditate upon the complex notions such as the relationship between purity and pollution, and the distinctions between self, body, objects, and nature.

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