In Memory of Air

Visitors to the 2019 Making Public exhibition at the RCA were invited to pause amid the busyness and rest on this park bench, where they could tune into a composition of 50 pranayama (yogic breathing) sounds. The composition was subsequently sampled for an Art of Now episode on BBC Radio 4, which explored the intersection of art and pollution. In memory of air was designed to raise awareness about air pollution by foregrounding the sacred process of breathing.

Benches are often provided as a public good and social resource, which ties in with discourses about the right to clean air and the atmosphere itself as a shared commons. The bench is also a vantage point for seeing the world-in-motion, inviting visitors to contemplate their surrounding environs as an act of restful self-care. In the installation, the furniture's displacement from outdoor space to gallery also disrupts preconceptions about interiority and exteriority, much like the element of air and the act of breathing. A plaque engraved with the enigmatic and solastalgic phrase 'in memory of air' pays tribute to Luce Irigaray's metaphysical and eco-feminist treatise, L'oubli de l'air chez Martin Heidegger (1983), which exposes Western society's 'forgetting' ('oubli') of air. See accompanying article, 'Breathing and nothingness' (Sabin 2019), published on medical humanities platform, The Polyphony.

For my Master of Research in Communication Design at the Royal College of Art (2019), I explored how air pollution and climates are represented in visual communication. Specifically, I focused on the problematic of how to map atmospheric phenomena. The objective was to go beyond land-based logic in cartography, to explore the transient and immersive nature of atmosphere in spatial design practices. My empirical research involved expert interviews, participatory workshops with design students, and installation design.

I held semi-structured interviews with four practitioners who, in various ways, are involved in mapping air and atmospheres, but have varying backgrounds in atmospheric chemistry, citizen science, graphic design, and lighting/set design. This variety of techniques then informed participatory workshops held at Brighton University and the Royal College of Art, during which design students prototyped local and embodied approaches to atmospheric cartography.

Atmosphere physically arises from air but can also denote a mood. Atmosphere brings together meteorological and emotional forces, but this combination alone does not define it. Atmosphere is immersive yet elusive, palpable yet transcendent. Fluctuating with space and time, it is a marker of both. Maps of atmosphere trace these fluctuations and translate them into contours. Unlike geopolitical borders on land maps, these coordinates emerge temporally as they are sensed by machines and more-than-human bodies.