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What is the vision for the Breathe Earth collective? And how has it been implemented so far?
From the beginning, the idea, or the reason why we founded our collective, was that we realised there are many projects that focus on architecture or on the landscape, but there’s always a dichotomy between infrastructure and landscape, it never quite comes together. Hybrid buildings do not include the ecological together with the built environment. When we think of them together, and you see air as part of a hybrid system, then you will create completely different architectures, and completely different spaces.
When you think about the winds and the humidity levels, and you think about the smells you can create, and you think about all these central to the experience that are part of our air that we are living in. The air is also our biosphere, it is our home. And this is basically one of the reasons why we realised that this is what we really want to focus on. Then we can really become better and less harmful to the environment if we manage to make buildings like a forest.
Air is the resource that influences everything: the storms that are occurring, the microclimate and weather conditions, it influences the energy we can produce. It's also influencing all the landscape and the agricultural practices. We are completely embedded in it and at the same time, we never talk about it.
We could talk about it as climate, but climate is so abstract, and it doesn't really relate to us. It's always about the climate crisis, but this is something somewhere else. Air is our fundamental life source. We can be without air for a few minutes and then it's over. So, it's one of these elements that is far too little researched and understood. With COVID, we realised that if I breathe and you breathe my breath, we are in constant interrelation. That was not something that people really considered before.
Now, all of a sudden it is becoming clear that we are all connected by sitting in a space together and sharing our breath. But at the same time, it's also something very private. It feels kind of intimate, particularly the sharing of breath.
In 2016, aerosol was not a bad term at all. Aerosols can be super positive, and super healthy. But of course, also very unhealthy. We participated in a group exhibition Dynamics of Air and a German artist was working with glass elements, which she blew by herself, where you have two parts, air and water inside, and then two people can share the breath through this class. It was super strange to do this. But it was also exactly working on this topic to create more consciousness about the relation of air and how it's our food, our life source.
Participate in the air diary project
How is the air diary creating a collective mind map? And to what extent can it be used to improve systems towards tackling issues like climate change?
The air diary was our idea to create more interaction with people thinking about air. It is an invitation to respond with a quote, a memory, an experience. We ask the question: What Means Air To You?
Air is poetic but it is not always a thing of beauty. If there is a red sky, it might not be just red because of a beautiful sunset, it could also be because of a lot of air pollution in the air.
We’ve just had an exhibition in Madrid where we did a crowd foresting event where we had 200 trees, and we've donated them to people who came visiting the exhibition and they had to promise to look for adequate space in the city to plant and take care of it. The first question is the suitability of where to plant it, where will it grow? A consideration is how much air does it produce? All these questions come up and and you have a very intense discussion immediately about very basic ecological questions about air in that sense and in the climate and so this could be compared to the air diary, the analogue way of getting these interactions, and I must say, I think these are even the more successful ones because they are you, as an artist, maybe you have really the possibility to get in direct exchange with completely different people and perspectives.
What I've learned is that many people see it as still a very abstract thing, the sky is the air and so on. Actually, to really understand it is to see it as a living entity that we are living in, that we all share air and that is not there is no border. If there is a nuclear problem somewhere, there is no border, it can’t be stopped, and we saw this with COVID. It interconnects everything and everyone in different ways but I had the feeling reading these responses that perhaps we have still not reached the level of understanding that we need, to see it as a critical mass, a critical element that we have to take care, and instead we are still in the poetic and abstract realms of perception.
I was giving a lecture to a school class once and I told them that they all share the air and then they all wanted to stop breathing, because they were like, 'Oh, my God!' And then they all looked at me like I was crazy. But it's reality and you just never think about it. So, the public really sees it as this abstract kind of thing. They don’t think about it deeply. However, I think through the pandemic that people have started to think more about this, this topic of sharing air and the virus, and, in turn, the problem of air pollution and our health has become clearer, more urgent.
There are more people dying from air pollution than from war but it is hard to get a real number as in many cases it is a silent killer, it builds up over time, then when someone has heart failure, the dots aren't drawn. However, there are more cases where it is being diagnosed and held accountable, bringing greater awareness into the public domain. That's also something for our societies to learn about. I think that we have that old question about what climate change is really about, how about our health is the human self, not the planetary health? Because our Earth will always somehow find a way to continue, without us, but the problem is that it's our home that we are destroying and in turn, we are also destroying our health. The two are intrinsically linked.
What is your personal relationship to the air element?
I live next to a little forest in the city of Linz. For me, it's super important to have fresh air coming in. I was in Iran, in Tehran, in 2016, and in this moment in Tehran my nose was bleeding, I really had the feeling I don't want to breathe anymore, because it was so disgusting. It was so hot, and there was so much pollution in the air that it really hurts when you breathe. This is a moment where I realised 'oh my god!' this is all manmade. And you see and feel the levels of pollution in the air. The inflow and outflow of the air just doesn't work anymore. You have this basin that the dust just always blows up against, and then falls down again, and it is impossible to get rid of it. So, this for me was the worst air conditions that I've ever experienced. And when I talk to the people living there, they are all really suffering from it, but at the same time, they're struggling with so much more.
Historically it wasn’t always this way. During the Industrial Revolution, of course, the air condition terrible because of the machinery. Nowadays, with modern technologies, this should no longer be necessary or acceptable. Still, the problem is through the continuing development, especially from high rise apartment buildings, and so on, they really block the natural flow that was possible before. Of course, there are other factors, but in general the problem is the topography of a city blocks the natural flow. The word Tehran means ‘good air’, and in former times it was from Shiraz that people travelled north to Tehran for the summer because it's close to the mountains and they could take in the good air. Now of course Tehran is completely overcrowded, and is no longer an ecological body. In that sense. It's an industrialised body, or ecosystem.
Participate in the AIR DIARY project
Breathe Earth Collective is Lisa Maria Enzenhofer, Andreas Goritschnig, Karlheinz Boiger, Markus Jeschaunig, Bernhard König
What is the vision for the Breathe Earth collective? And how has it been implemented so far?
From the beginning, the idea, or the reason why we founded our collective, was that we realised there are many projects that focus on architecture or on the landscape, but there’s always a dichotomy between infrastructure and landscape, it never quite comes together. Hybrid buildings do not include the ecological together with the built environment. When we think of them together, and you see air as part of a hybrid system, then you will create completely different architectures, and completely different spaces.
When you think about the winds and the humidity levels, and you think about the smells you can create, and you think about all these central to the experience that are part of our air that we are living in. The air is also our biosphere, it is our home. And this is basically one of the reasons why we realised that this is what we really want to focus on. Then we can really become better and less harmful to the environment if we manage to make buildings like a forest.
Air is the resource that influences everything: the storms that are occurring, the microclimate and weather conditions, it influences the energy we can produce. It's also influencing all the landscape and the agricultural practices. We are completely embedded in it and at the same time, we never talk about it.
We could talk about it as climate, but climate is so abstract, and it doesn't really relate to us. It's always about the climate crisis, but this is something somewhere else. Air is our fundamental life source. We can be without air for a few minutes and then it's over. So, it's one of these elements that is far too little researched and understood. With COVID, we realised that if I breathe and you breathe my breath, we are in constant interrelation. That was not something that people really considered before.
Now, all of a sudden it is becoming clear that we are all connected by sitting in a space together and sharing our breath. But at the same time, it's also something very private. It feels kind of intimate, particularly the sharing of breath.
In 2016, aerosol was not a bad term at all. Aerosols can be super positive, and super healthy. But of course, also very unhealthy. We participated in a group exhibition Dynamics of Air and a German artist was working with glass elements, which she blew by herself, where you have two parts, air and water inside, and then two people can share the breath through this class. It was super strange to do this. But it was also exactly working on this topic to create more consciousness about the relation of air and how it's our food, our life source.
Participate in the air diary project
How is the air diary creating a collective mind map? And to what extent can it be used to improve systems towards tackling issues like climate change?
The air diary was our idea to create more interaction with people thinking about air. It is an invitation to respond with a quote, a memory, an experience. We ask the question: What Means Air To You?
Air is poetic but it is not always a thing of beauty. If there is a red sky, it might not be just red because of a beautiful sunset, it could also be because of a lot of air pollution in the air.
We’ve just had an exhibition in Madrid where we did a crowd foresting event where we had 200 trees, and we've donated them to people who came visiting the exhibition and they had to promise to look for adequate space in the city to plant and take care of it. The first question is the suitability of where to plant it, where will it grow? A consideration is how much air does it produce? All these questions come up and and you have a very intense discussion immediately about very basic ecological questions about air in that sense and in the climate and so this could be compared to the air diary, the analogue way of getting these interactions, and I must say, I think these are even the more successful ones because they are you, as an artist, maybe you have really the possibility to get in direct exchange with completely different people and perspectives.
What I've learned is that many people see it as still a very abstract thing, the sky is the air and so on. Actually, to really understand it is to see it as a living entity that we are living in, that we all share air and that is not there is no border. If there is a nuclear problem somewhere, there is no border, it can’t be stopped, and we saw this with COVID. It interconnects everything and everyone in different ways but I had the feeling reading these responses that perhaps we have still not reached the level of understanding that we need, to see it as a critical mass, a critical element that we have to take care, and instead we are still in the poetic and abstract realms of perception.
I was giving a lecture to a school class once and I told them that they all share the air and then they all wanted to stop breathing, because they were like, 'Oh, my God!' And then they all looked at me like I was crazy. But it's reality and you just never think about it. So, the public really sees it as this abstract kind of thing. They don’t think about it deeply. However, I think through the pandemic that people have started to think more about this, this topic of sharing air and the virus, and, in turn, the problem of air pollution and our health has become clearer, more urgent.
There are more people dying from air pollution than from war but it is hard to get a real number as in many cases it is a silent killer, it builds up over time, then when someone has heart failure, the dots aren't drawn. However, there are more cases where it is being diagnosed and held accountable, bringing greater awareness into the public domain. That's also something for our societies to learn about. I think that we have that old question about what climate change is really about, how about our health is the human self, not the planetary health? Because our Earth will always somehow find a way to continue, without us, but the problem is that it's our home that we are destroying and in turn, we are also destroying our health. The two are intrinsically linked.
What is your personal relationship to the air element?
I live next to a little forest in the city of Linz. For me, it's super important to have fresh air coming in. I was in Iran, in Tehran, in 2016, and in this moment in Tehran my nose was bleeding, I really had the feeling I don't want to breathe anymore, because it was so disgusting. It was so hot, and there was so much pollution in the air that it really hurts when you breathe. This is a moment where I realised 'oh my god!' this is all manmade. And you see and feel the levels of pollution in the air. The inflow and outflow of the air just doesn't work anymore. You have this basin that the dust just always blows up against, and then falls down again, and it is impossible to get rid of it. So, this for me was the worst air conditions that I've ever experienced. And when I talk to the people living there, they are all really suffering from it, but at the same time, they're struggling with so much more.
Historically it wasn’t always this way. During the Industrial Revolution, of course, the air condition terrible because of the machinery. Nowadays, with modern technologies, this should no longer be necessary or acceptable. Still, the problem is through the continuing development, especially from high rise apartment buildings, and so on, they really block the natural flow that was possible before. Of course, there are other factors, but in general the problem is the topography of a city blocks the natural flow. The word Tehran means ‘good air’, and in former times it was from Shiraz that people travelled north to Tehran for the summer because it's close to the mountains and they could take in the good air. Now of course Tehran is completely overcrowded, and is no longer an ecological body. In that sense. It's an industrialised body, or ecosystem.
Participate in the AIR DIARY project
Breathe Earth Collective is Lisa Maria Enzenhofer, Andreas Goritschnig, Karlheinz Boiger, Markus Jeschaunig, Bernhard König
What is the vision for the Breathe Earth collective? And how has it been implemented so far?
From the beginning, the idea, or the reason why we founded our collective, was that we realised there are many projects that focus on architecture or on the landscape, but there’s always a dichotomy between infrastructure and landscape, it never quite comes together. Hybrid buildings do not include the ecological together with the built environment. When we think of them together, and you see air as part of a hybrid system, then you will create completely different architectures, and completely different spaces.
When you think about the winds and the humidity levels, and you think about the smells you can create, and you think about all these central to the experience that are part of our air that we are living in. The air is also our biosphere, it is our home. And this is basically one of the reasons why we realised that this is what we really want to focus on. Then we can really become better and less harmful to the environment if we manage to make buildings like a forest.
Air is the resource that influences everything: the storms that are occurring, the microclimate and weather conditions, it influences the energy we can produce. It's also influencing all the landscape and the agricultural practices. We are completely embedded in it and at the same time, we never talk about it.
We could talk about it as climate, but climate is so abstract, and it doesn't really relate to us. It's always about the climate crisis, but this is something somewhere else. Air is our fundamental life source. We can be without air for a few minutes and then it's over. So, it's one of these elements that is far too little researched and understood. With COVID, we realised that if I breathe and you breathe my breath, we are in constant interrelation. That was not something that people really considered before.
Now, all of a sudden it is becoming clear that we are all connected by sitting in a space together and sharing our breath. But at the same time, it's also something very private. It feels kind of intimate, particularly the sharing of breath.
In 2016, aerosol was not a bad term at all. Aerosols can be super positive, and super healthy. But of course, also very unhealthy. We participated in a group exhibition Dynamics of Air and a German artist was working with glass elements, which she blew by herself, where you have two parts, air and water inside, and then two people can share the breath through this class. It was super strange to do this. But it was also exactly working on this topic to create more consciousness about the relation of air and how it's our food, our life source.
Participate in the air diary project
How is the air diary creating a collective mind map? And to what extent can it be used to improve systems towards tackling issues like climate change?
The air diary was our idea to create more interaction with people thinking about air. It is an invitation to respond with a quote, a memory, an experience. We ask the question: What Means Air To You?
Air is poetic but it is not always a thing of beauty. If there is a red sky, it might not be just red because of a beautiful sunset, it could also be because of a lot of air pollution in the air.
We’ve just had an exhibition in Madrid where we did a crowd foresting event where we had 200 trees, and we've donated them to people who came visiting the exhibition and they had to promise to look for adequate space in the city to plant and take care of it. The first question is the suitability of where to plant it, where will it grow? A consideration is how much air does it produce? All these questions come up and and you have a very intense discussion immediately about very basic ecological questions about air in that sense and in the climate and so this could be compared to the air diary, the analogue way of getting these interactions, and I must say, I think these are even the more successful ones because they are you, as an artist, maybe you have really the possibility to get in direct exchange with completely different people and perspectives.
What I've learned is that many people see it as still a very abstract thing, the sky is the air and so on. Actually, to really understand it is to see it as a living entity that we are living in, that we all share air and that is not there is no border. If there is a nuclear problem somewhere, there is no border, it can’t be stopped, and we saw this with COVID. It interconnects everything and everyone in different ways but I had the feeling reading these responses that perhaps we have still not reached the level of understanding that we need, to see it as a critical mass, a critical element that we have to take care, and instead we are still in the poetic and abstract realms of perception.
I was giving a lecture to a school class once and I told them that they all share the air and then they all wanted to stop breathing, because they were like, 'Oh, my God!' And then they all looked at me like I was crazy. But it's reality and you just never think about it. So, the public really sees it as this abstract kind of thing. They don’t think about it deeply. However, I think through the pandemic that people have started to think more about this, this topic of sharing air and the virus, and, in turn, the problem of air pollution and our health has become clearer, more urgent.
There are more people dying from air pollution than from war but it is hard to get a real number as in many cases it is a silent killer, it builds up over time, then when someone has heart failure, the dots aren't drawn. However, there are more cases where it is being diagnosed and held accountable, bringing greater awareness into the public domain. That's also something for our societies to learn about. I think that we have that old question about what climate change is really about, how about our health is the human self, not the planetary health? Because our Earth will always somehow find a way to continue, without us, but the problem is that it's our home that we are destroying and in turn, we are also destroying our health. The two are intrinsically linked.
What is your personal relationship to the air element?
I live next to a little forest in the city of Linz. For me, it's super important to have fresh air coming in. I was in Iran, in Tehran, in 2016, and in this moment in Tehran my nose was bleeding, I really had the feeling I don't want to breathe anymore, because it was so disgusting. It was so hot, and there was so much pollution in the air that it really hurts when you breathe. This is a moment where I realised 'oh my god!' this is all manmade. And you see and feel the levels of pollution in the air. The inflow and outflow of the air just doesn't work anymore. You have this basin that the dust just always blows up against, and then falls down again, and it is impossible to get rid of it. So, this for me was the worst air conditions that I've ever experienced. And when I talk to the people living there, they are all really suffering from it, but at the same time, they're struggling with so much more.
Historically it wasn’t always this way. During the Industrial Revolution, of course, the air condition terrible because of the machinery. Nowadays, with modern technologies, this should no longer be necessary or acceptable. Still, the problem is through the continuing development, especially from high rise apartment buildings, and so on, they really block the natural flow that was possible before. Of course, there are other factors, but in general the problem is the topography of a city blocks the natural flow. The word Tehran means ‘good air’, and in former times it was from Shiraz that people travelled north to Tehran for the summer because it's close to the mountains and they could take in the good air. Now of course Tehran is completely overcrowded, and is no longer an ecological body. In that sense. It's an industrialised body, or ecosystem.
Participate in the AIR DIARY project
Breathe Earth Collective is Lisa Maria Enzenhofer, Andreas Goritschnig, Karlheinz Boiger, Markus Jeschaunig, Bernhard König
What is the vision for the Breathe Earth collective? And how has it been implemented so far?
From the beginning, the idea, or the reason why we founded our collective, was that we realised there are many projects that focus on architecture or on the landscape, but there’s always a dichotomy between infrastructure and landscape, it never quite comes together. Hybrid buildings do not include the ecological together with the built environment. When we think of them together, and you see air as part of a hybrid system, then you will create completely different architectures, and completely different spaces.
When you think about the winds and the humidity levels, and you think about the smells you can create, and you think about all these central to the experience that are part of our air that we are living in. The air is also our biosphere, it is our home. And this is basically one of the reasons why we realised that this is what we really want to focus on. Then we can really become better and less harmful to the environment if we manage to make buildings like a forest.
Air is the resource that influences everything: the storms that are occurring, the microclimate and weather conditions, it influences the energy we can produce. It's also influencing all the landscape and the agricultural practices. We are completely embedded in it and at the same time, we never talk about it.
We could talk about it as climate, but climate is so abstract, and it doesn't really relate to us. It's always about the climate crisis, but this is something somewhere else. Air is our fundamental life source. We can be without air for a few minutes and then it's over. So, it's one of these elements that is far too little researched and understood. With COVID, we realised that if I breathe and you breathe my breath, we are in constant interrelation. That was not something that people really considered before.
Now, all of a sudden it is becoming clear that we are all connected by sitting in a space together and sharing our breath. But at the same time, it's also something very private. It feels kind of intimate, particularly the sharing of breath.
In 2016, aerosol was not a bad term at all. Aerosols can be super positive, and super healthy. But of course, also very unhealthy. We participated in a group exhibition Dynamics of Air and a German artist was working with glass elements, which she blew by herself, where you have two parts, air and water inside, and then two people can share the breath through this class. It was super strange to do this. But it was also exactly working on this topic to create more consciousness about the relation of air and how it's our food, our life source.
Participate in the air diary project
How is the air diary creating a collective mind map? And to what extent can it be used to improve systems towards tackling issues like climate change?
The air diary was our idea to create more interaction with people thinking about air. It is an invitation to respond with a quote, a memory, an experience. We ask the question: What Means Air To You?
Air is poetic but it is not always a thing of beauty. If there is a red sky, it might not be just red because of a beautiful sunset, it could also be because of a lot of air pollution in the air.
We’ve just had an exhibition in Madrid where we did a crowd foresting event where we had 200 trees, and we've donated them to people who came visiting the exhibition and they had to promise to look for adequate space in the city to plant and take care of it. The first question is the suitability of where to plant it, where will it grow? A consideration is how much air does it produce? All these questions come up and and you have a very intense discussion immediately about very basic ecological questions about air in that sense and in the climate and so this could be compared to the air diary, the analogue way of getting these interactions, and I must say, I think these are even the more successful ones because they are you, as an artist, maybe you have really the possibility to get in direct exchange with completely different people and perspectives.
What I've learned is that many people see it as still a very abstract thing, the sky is the air and so on. Actually, to really understand it is to see it as a living entity that we are living in, that we all share air and that is not there is no border. If there is a nuclear problem somewhere, there is no border, it can’t be stopped, and we saw this with COVID. It interconnects everything and everyone in different ways but I had the feeling reading these responses that perhaps we have still not reached the level of understanding that we need, to see it as a critical mass, a critical element that we have to take care, and instead we are still in the poetic and abstract realms of perception.
I was giving a lecture to a school class once and I told them that they all share the air and then they all wanted to stop breathing, because they were like, 'Oh, my God!' And then they all looked at me like I was crazy. But it's reality and you just never think about it. So, the public really sees it as this abstract kind of thing. They don’t think about it deeply. However, I think through the pandemic that people have started to think more about this, this topic of sharing air and the virus, and, in turn, the problem of air pollution and our health has become clearer, more urgent.
There are more people dying from air pollution than from war but it is hard to get a real number as in many cases it is a silent killer, it builds up over time, then when someone has heart failure, the dots aren't drawn. However, there are more cases where it is being diagnosed and held accountable, bringing greater awareness into the public domain. That's also something for our societies to learn about. I think that we have that old question about what climate change is really about, how about our health is the human self, not the planetary health? Because our Earth will always somehow find a way to continue, without us, but the problem is that it's our home that we are destroying and in turn, we are also destroying our health. The two are intrinsically linked.
What is your personal relationship to the air element?
I live next to a little forest in the city of Linz. For me, it's super important to have fresh air coming in. I was in Iran, in Tehran, in 2016, and in this moment in Tehran my nose was bleeding, I really had the feeling I don't want to breathe anymore, because it was so disgusting. It was so hot, and there was so much pollution in the air that it really hurts when you breathe. This is a moment where I realised 'oh my god!' this is all manmade. And you see and feel the levels of pollution in the air. The inflow and outflow of the air just doesn't work anymore. You have this basin that the dust just always blows up against, and then falls down again, and it is impossible to get rid of it. So, this for me was the worst air conditions that I've ever experienced. And when I talk to the people living there, they are all really suffering from it, but at the same time, they're struggling with so much more.
Historically it wasn’t always this way. During the Industrial Revolution, of course, the air condition terrible because of the machinery. Nowadays, with modern technologies, this should no longer be necessary or acceptable. Still, the problem is through the continuing development, especially from high rise apartment buildings, and so on, they really block the natural flow that was possible before. Of course, there are other factors, but in general the problem is the topography of a city blocks the natural flow. The word Tehran means ‘good air’, and in former times it was from Shiraz that people travelled north to Tehran for the summer because it's close to the mountains and they could take in the good air. Now of course Tehran is completely overcrowded, and is no longer an ecological body. In that sense. It's an industrialised body, or ecosystem.
Participate in the AIR DIARY project
Breathe Earth Collective is Lisa Maria Enzenhofer, Andreas Goritschnig, Karlheinz Boiger, Markus Jeschaunig, Bernhard König
What is the vision for the Breathe Earth collective? And how has it been implemented so far?
From the beginning, the idea, or the reason why we founded our collective, was that we realised there are many projects that focus on architecture or on the landscape, but there’s always a dichotomy between infrastructure and landscape, it never quite comes together. Hybrid buildings do not include the ecological together with the built environment. When we think of them together, and you see air as part of a hybrid system, then you will create completely different architectures, and completely different spaces.
When you think about the winds and the humidity levels, and you think about the smells you can create, and you think about all these central to the experience that are part of our air that we are living in. The air is also our biosphere, it is our home. And this is basically one of the reasons why we realised that this is what we really want to focus on. Then we can really become better and less harmful to the environment if we manage to make buildings like a forest.
Air is the resource that influences everything: the storms that are occurring, the microclimate and weather conditions, it influences the energy we can produce. It's also influencing all the landscape and the agricultural practices. We are completely embedded in it and at the same time, we never talk about it.
We could talk about it as climate, but climate is so abstract, and it doesn't really relate to us. It's always about the climate crisis, but this is something somewhere else. Air is our fundamental life source. We can be without air for a few minutes and then it's over. So, it's one of these elements that is far too little researched and understood. With COVID, we realised that if I breathe and you breathe my breath, we are in constant interrelation. That was not something that people really considered before.
Now, all of a sudden it is becoming clear that we are all connected by sitting in a space together and sharing our breath. But at the same time, it's also something very private. It feels kind of intimate, particularly the sharing of breath.
In 2016, aerosol was not a bad term at all. Aerosols can be super positive, and super healthy. But of course, also very unhealthy. We participated in a group exhibition Dynamics of Air and a German artist was working with glass elements, which she blew by herself, where you have two parts, air and water inside, and then two people can share the breath through this class. It was super strange to do this. But it was also exactly working on this topic to create more consciousness about the relation of air and how it's our food, our life source.
Participate in the air diary project
How is the air diary creating a collective mind map? And to what extent can it be used to improve systems towards tackling issues like climate change?
The air diary was our idea to create more interaction with people thinking about air. It is an invitation to respond with a quote, a memory, an experience. We ask the question: What Means Air To You?
Air is poetic but it is not always a thing of beauty. If there is a red sky, it might not be just red because of a beautiful sunset, it could also be because of a lot of air pollution in the air.
We’ve just had an exhibition in Madrid where we did a crowd foresting event where we had 200 trees, and we've donated them to people who came visiting the exhibition and they had to promise to look for adequate space in the city to plant and take care of it. The first question is the suitability of where to plant it, where will it grow? A consideration is how much air does it produce? All these questions come up and and you have a very intense discussion immediately about very basic ecological questions about air in that sense and in the climate and so this could be compared to the air diary, the analogue way of getting these interactions, and I must say, I think these are even the more successful ones because they are you, as an artist, maybe you have really the possibility to get in direct exchange with completely different people and perspectives.
What I've learned is that many people see it as still a very abstract thing, the sky is the air and so on. Actually, to really understand it is to see it as a living entity that we are living in, that we all share air and that is not there is no border. If there is a nuclear problem somewhere, there is no border, it can’t be stopped, and we saw this with COVID. It interconnects everything and everyone in different ways but I had the feeling reading these responses that perhaps we have still not reached the level of understanding that we need, to see it as a critical mass, a critical element that we have to take care, and instead we are still in the poetic and abstract realms of perception.
I was giving a lecture to a school class once and I told them that they all share the air and then they all wanted to stop breathing, because they were like, 'Oh, my God!' And then they all looked at me like I was crazy. But it's reality and you just never think about it. So, the public really sees it as this abstract kind of thing. They don’t think about it deeply. However, I think through the pandemic that people have started to think more about this, this topic of sharing air and the virus, and, in turn, the problem of air pollution and our health has become clearer, more urgent.
There are more people dying from air pollution than from war but it is hard to get a real number as in many cases it is a silent killer, it builds up over time, then when someone has heart failure, the dots aren't drawn. However, there are more cases where it is being diagnosed and held accountable, bringing greater awareness into the public domain. That's also something for our societies to learn about. I think that we have that old question about what climate change is really about, how about our health is the human self, not the planetary health? Because our Earth will always somehow find a way to continue, without us, but the problem is that it's our home that we are destroying and in turn, we are also destroying our health. The two are intrinsically linked.
What is your personal relationship to the air element?
I live next to a little forest in the city of Linz. For me, it's super important to have fresh air coming in. I was in Iran, in Tehran, in 2016, and in this moment in Tehran my nose was bleeding, I really had the feeling I don't want to breathe anymore, because it was so disgusting. It was so hot, and there was so much pollution in the air that it really hurts when you breathe. This is a moment where I realised 'oh my god!' this is all manmade. And you see and feel the levels of pollution in the air. The inflow and outflow of the air just doesn't work anymore. You have this basin that the dust just always blows up against, and then falls down again, and it is impossible to get rid of it. So, this for me was the worst air conditions that I've ever experienced. And when I talk to the people living there, they are all really suffering from it, but at the same time, they're struggling with so much more.
Historically it wasn’t always this way. During the Industrial Revolution, of course, the air condition terrible because of the machinery. Nowadays, with modern technologies, this should no longer be necessary or acceptable. Still, the problem is through the continuing development, especially from high rise apartment buildings, and so on, they really block the natural flow that was possible before. Of course, there are other factors, but in general the problem is the topography of a city blocks the natural flow. The word Tehran means ‘good air’, and in former times it was from Shiraz that people travelled north to Tehran for the summer because it's close to the mountains and they could take in the good air. Now of course Tehran is completely overcrowded, and is no longer an ecological body. In that sense. It's an industrialised body, or ecosystem.
Participate in the AIR DIARY project
Breathe Earth Collective is Lisa Maria Enzenhofer, Andreas Goritschnig, Karlheinz Boiger, Markus Jeschaunig, Bernhard König
What is the vision for the Breathe Earth collective? And how has it been implemented so far?
From the beginning, the idea, or the reason why we founded our collective, was that we realised there are many projects that focus on architecture or on the landscape, but there’s always a dichotomy between infrastructure and landscape, it never quite comes together. Hybrid buildings do not include the ecological together with the built environment. When we think of them together, and you see air as part of a hybrid system, then you will create completely different architectures, and completely different spaces.
When you think about the winds and the humidity levels, and you think about the smells you can create, and you think about all these central to the experience that are part of our air that we are living in. The air is also our biosphere, it is our home. And this is basically one of the reasons why we realised that this is what we really want to focus on. Then we can really become better and less harmful to the environment if we manage to make buildings like a forest.
Air is the resource that influences everything: the storms that are occurring, the microclimate and weather conditions, it influences the energy we can produce. It's also influencing all the landscape and the agricultural practices. We are completely embedded in it and at the same time, we never talk about it.
We could talk about it as climate, but climate is so abstract, and it doesn't really relate to us. It's always about the climate crisis, but this is something somewhere else. Air is our fundamental life source. We can be without air for a few minutes and then it's over. So, it's one of these elements that is far too little researched and understood. With COVID, we realised that if I breathe and you breathe my breath, we are in constant interrelation. That was not something that people really considered before.
Now, all of a sudden it is becoming clear that we are all connected by sitting in a space together and sharing our breath. But at the same time, it's also something very private. It feels kind of intimate, particularly the sharing of breath.
In 2016, aerosol was not a bad term at all. Aerosols can be super positive, and super healthy. But of course, also very unhealthy. We participated in a group exhibition Dynamics of Air and a German artist was working with glass elements, which she blew by herself, where you have two parts, air and water inside, and then two people can share the breath through this class. It was super strange to do this. But it was also exactly working on this topic to create more consciousness about the relation of air and how it's our food, our life source.
Participate in the air diary project
How is the air diary creating a collective mind map? And to what extent can it be used to improve systems towards tackling issues like climate change?
The air diary was our idea to create more interaction with people thinking about air. It is an invitation to respond with a quote, a memory, an experience. We ask the question: What Means Air To You?
Air is poetic but it is not always a thing of beauty. If there is a red sky, it might not be just red because of a beautiful sunset, it could also be because of a lot of air pollution in the air.
We’ve just had an exhibition in Madrid where we did a crowd foresting event where we had 200 trees, and we've donated them to people who came visiting the exhibition and they had to promise to look for adequate space in the city to plant and take care of it. The first question is the suitability of where to plant it, where will it grow? A consideration is how much air does it produce? All these questions come up and and you have a very intense discussion immediately about very basic ecological questions about air in that sense and in the climate and so this could be compared to the air diary, the analogue way of getting these interactions, and I must say, I think these are even the more successful ones because they are you, as an artist, maybe you have really the possibility to get in direct exchange with completely different people and perspectives.
What I've learned is that many people see it as still a very abstract thing, the sky is the air and so on. Actually, to really understand it is to see it as a living entity that we are living in, that we all share air and that is not there is no border. If there is a nuclear problem somewhere, there is no border, it can’t be stopped, and we saw this with COVID. It interconnects everything and everyone in different ways but I had the feeling reading these responses that perhaps we have still not reached the level of understanding that we need, to see it as a critical mass, a critical element that we have to take care, and instead we are still in the poetic and abstract realms of perception.
I was giving a lecture to a school class once and I told them that they all share the air and then they all wanted to stop breathing, because they were like, 'Oh, my God!' And then they all looked at me like I was crazy. But it's reality and you just never think about it. So, the public really sees it as this abstract kind of thing. They don’t think about it deeply. However, I think through the pandemic that people have started to think more about this, this topic of sharing air and the virus, and, in turn, the problem of air pollution and our health has become clearer, more urgent.
There are more people dying from air pollution than from war but it is hard to get a real number as in many cases it is a silent killer, it builds up over time, then when someone has heart failure, the dots aren't drawn. However, there are more cases where it is being diagnosed and held accountable, bringing greater awareness into the public domain. That's also something for our societies to learn about. I think that we have that old question about what climate change is really about, how about our health is the human self, not the planetary health? Because our Earth will always somehow find a way to continue, without us, but the problem is that it's our home that we are destroying and in turn, we are also destroying our health. The two are intrinsically linked.
What is your personal relationship to the air element?
I live next to a little forest in the city of Linz. For me, it's super important to have fresh air coming in. I was in Iran, in Tehran, in 2016, and in this moment in Tehran my nose was bleeding, I really had the feeling I don't want to breathe anymore, because it was so disgusting. It was so hot, and there was so much pollution in the air that it really hurts when you breathe. This is a moment where I realised 'oh my god!' this is all manmade. And you see and feel the levels of pollution in the air. The inflow and outflow of the air just doesn't work anymore. You have this basin that the dust just always blows up against, and then falls down again, and it is impossible to get rid of it. So, this for me was the worst air conditions that I've ever experienced. And when I talk to the people living there, they are all really suffering from it, but at the same time, they're struggling with so much more.
Historically it wasn’t always this way. During the Industrial Revolution, of course, the air condition terrible because of the machinery. Nowadays, with modern technologies, this should no longer be necessary or acceptable. Still, the problem is through the continuing development, especially from high rise apartment buildings, and so on, they really block the natural flow that was possible before. Of course, there are other factors, but in general the problem is the topography of a city blocks the natural flow. The word Tehran means ‘good air’, and in former times it was from Shiraz that people travelled north to Tehran for the summer because it's close to the mountains and they could take in the good air. Now of course Tehran is completely overcrowded, and is no longer an ecological body. In that sense. It's an industrialised body, or ecosystem.
Participate in the AIR DIARY project
Breathe Earth Collective is Lisa Maria Enzenhofer, Andreas Goritschnig, Karlheinz Boiger, Markus Jeschaunig, Bernhard König
What is the vision for the Breathe Earth collective? And how has it been implemented so far?
From the beginning, the idea, or the reason why we founded our collective, was that we realised there are many projects that focus on architecture or on the landscape, but there’s always a dichotomy between infrastructure and landscape, it never quite comes together. Hybrid buildings do not include the ecological together with the built environment. When we think of them together, and you see air as part of a hybrid system, then you will create completely different architectures, and completely different spaces.
When you think about the winds and the humidity levels, and you think about the smells you can create, and you think about all these central to the experience that are part of our air that we are living in. The air is also our biosphere, it is our home. And this is basically one of the reasons why we realised that this is what we really want to focus on. Then we can really become better and less harmful to the environment if we manage to make buildings like a forest.
Air is the resource that influences everything: the storms that are occurring, the microclimate and weather conditions, it influences the energy we can produce. It's also influencing all the landscape and the agricultural practices. We are completely embedded in it and at the same time, we never talk about it.
We could talk about it as climate, but climate is so abstract, and it doesn't really relate to us. It's always about the climate crisis, but this is something somewhere else. Air is our fundamental life source. We can be without air for a few minutes and then it's over. So, it's one of these elements that is far too little researched and understood. With COVID, we realised that if I breathe and you breathe my breath, we are in constant interrelation. That was not something that people really considered before.
Now, all of a sudden it is becoming clear that we are all connected by sitting in a space together and sharing our breath. But at the same time, it's also something very private. It feels kind of intimate, particularly the sharing of breath.
In 2016, aerosol was not a bad term at all. Aerosols can be super positive, and super healthy. But of course, also very unhealthy. We participated in a group exhibition Dynamics of Air and a German artist was working with glass elements, which she blew by herself, where you have two parts, air and water inside, and then two people can share the breath through this class. It was super strange to do this. But it was also exactly working on this topic to create more consciousness about the relation of air and how it's our food, our life source.
Participate in the air diary project
How is the air diary creating a collective mind map? And to what extent can it be used to improve systems towards tackling issues like climate change?
The air diary was our idea to create more interaction with people thinking about air. It is an invitation to respond with a quote, a memory, an experience. We ask the question: What Means Air To You?
Air is poetic but it is not always a thing of beauty. If there is a red sky, it might not be just red because of a beautiful sunset, it could also be because of a lot of air pollution in the air.
We’ve just had an exhibition in Madrid where we did a crowd foresting event where we had 200 trees, and we've donated them to people who came visiting the exhibition and they had to promise to look for adequate space in the city to plant and take care of it. The first question is the suitability of where to plant it, where will it grow? A consideration is how much air does it produce? All these questions come up and and you have a very intense discussion immediately about very basic ecological questions about air in that sense and in the climate and so this could be compared to the air diary, the analogue way of getting these interactions, and I must say, I think these are even the more successful ones because they are you, as an artist, maybe you have really the possibility to get in direct exchange with completely different people and perspectives.
What I've learned is that many people see it as still a very abstract thing, the sky is the air and so on. Actually, to really understand it is to see it as a living entity that we are living in, that we all share air and that is not there is no border. If there is a nuclear problem somewhere, there is no border, it can’t be stopped, and we saw this with COVID. It interconnects everything and everyone in different ways but I had the feeling reading these responses that perhaps we have still not reached the level of understanding that we need, to see it as a critical mass, a critical element that we have to take care, and instead we are still in the poetic and abstract realms of perception.
I was giving a lecture to a school class once and I told them that they all share the air and then they all wanted to stop breathing, because they were like, 'Oh, my God!' And then they all looked at me like I was crazy. But it's reality and you just never think about it. So, the public really sees it as this abstract kind of thing. They don’t think about it deeply. However, I think through the pandemic that people have started to think more about this, this topic of sharing air and the virus, and, in turn, the problem of air pollution and our health has become clearer, more urgent.
There are more people dying from air pollution than from war but it is hard to get a real number as in many cases it is a silent killer, it builds up over time, then when someone has heart failure, the dots aren't drawn. However, there are more cases where it is being diagnosed and held accountable, bringing greater awareness into the public domain. That's also something for our societies to learn about. I think that we have that old question about what climate change is really about, how about our health is the human self, not the planetary health? Because our Earth will always somehow find a way to continue, without us, but the problem is that it's our home that we are destroying and in turn, we are also destroying our health. The two are intrinsically linked.
What is your personal relationship to the air element?
I live next to a little forest in the city of Linz. For me, it's super important to have fresh air coming in. I was in Iran, in Tehran, in 2016, and in this moment in Tehran my nose was bleeding, I really had the feeling I don't want to breathe anymore, because it was so disgusting. It was so hot, and there was so much pollution in the air that it really hurts when you breathe. This is a moment where I realised 'oh my god!' this is all manmade. And you see and feel the levels of pollution in the air. The inflow and outflow of the air just doesn't work anymore. You have this basin that the dust just always blows up against, and then falls down again, and it is impossible to get rid of it. So, this for me was the worst air conditions that I've ever experienced. And when I talk to the people living there, they are all really suffering from it, but at the same time, they're struggling with so much more.
Historically it wasn’t always this way. During the Industrial Revolution, of course, the air condition terrible because of the machinery. Nowadays, with modern technologies, this should no longer be necessary or acceptable. Still, the problem is through the continuing development, especially from high rise apartment buildings, and so on, they really block the natural flow that was possible before. Of course, there are other factors, but in general the problem is the topography of a city blocks the natural flow. The word Tehran means ‘good air’, and in former times it was from Shiraz that people travelled north to Tehran for the summer because it's close to the mountains and they could take in the good air. Now of course Tehran is completely overcrowded, and is no longer an ecological body. In that sense. It's an industrialised body, or ecosystem.
Participate in the AIR DIARY project
Breathe Earth Collective is Lisa Maria Enzenhofer, Andreas Goritschnig, Karlheinz Boiger, Markus Jeschaunig, Bernhard König
What is the vision for the Breathe Earth collective? And how has it been implemented so far?
From the beginning, the idea, or the reason why we founded our collective, was that we realised there are many projects that focus on architecture or on the landscape, but there’s always a dichotomy between infrastructure and landscape, it never quite comes together. Hybrid buildings do not include the ecological together with the built environment. When we think of them together, and you see air as part of a hybrid system, then you will create completely different architectures, and completely different spaces.
When you think about the winds and the humidity levels, and you think about the smells you can create, and you think about all these central to the experience that are part of our air that we are living in. The air is also our biosphere, it is our home. And this is basically one of the reasons why we realised that this is what we really want to focus on. Then we can really become better and less harmful to the environment if we manage to make buildings like a forest.
Air is the resource that influences everything: the storms that are occurring, the microclimate and weather conditions, it influences the energy we can produce. It's also influencing all the landscape and the agricultural practices. We are completely embedded in it and at the same time, we never talk about it.
We could talk about it as climate, but climate is so abstract, and it doesn't really relate to us. It's always about the climate crisis, but this is something somewhere else. Air is our fundamental life source. We can be without air for a few minutes and then it's over. So, it's one of these elements that is far too little researched and understood. With COVID, we realised that if I breathe and you breathe my breath, we are in constant interrelation. That was not something that people really considered before.
Now, all of a sudden it is becoming clear that we are all connected by sitting in a space together and sharing our breath. But at the same time, it's also something very private. It feels kind of intimate, particularly the sharing of breath.
In 2016, aerosol was not a bad term at all. Aerosols can be super positive, and super healthy. But of course, also very unhealthy. We participated in a group exhibition Dynamics of Air and a German artist was working with glass elements, which she blew by herself, where you have two parts, air and water inside, and then two people can share the breath through this class. It was super strange to do this. But it was also exactly working on this topic to create more consciousness about the relation of air and how it's our food, our life source.
Participate in the air diary project
How is the air diary creating a collective mind map? And to what extent can it be used to improve systems towards tackling issues like climate change?
The air diary was our idea to create more interaction with people thinking about air. It is an invitation to respond with a quote, a memory, an experience. We ask the question: What Means Air To You?
Air is poetic but it is not always a thing of beauty. If there is a red sky, it might not be just red because of a beautiful sunset, it could also be because of a lot of air pollution in the air.
We’ve just had an exhibition in Madrid where we did a crowd foresting event where we had 200 trees, and we've donated them to people who came visiting the exhibition and they had to promise to look for adequate space in the city to plant and take care of it. The first question is the suitability of where to plant it, where will it grow? A consideration is how much air does it produce? All these questions come up and and you have a very intense discussion immediately about very basic ecological questions about air in that sense and in the climate and so this could be compared to the air diary, the analogue way of getting these interactions, and I must say, I think these are even the more successful ones because they are you, as an artist, maybe you have really the possibility to get in direct exchange with completely different people and perspectives.
What I've learned is that many people see it as still a very abstract thing, the sky is the air and so on. Actually, to really understand it is to see it as a living entity that we are living in, that we all share air and that is not there is no border. If there is a nuclear problem somewhere, there is no border, it can’t be stopped, and we saw this with COVID. It interconnects everything and everyone in different ways but I had the feeling reading these responses that perhaps we have still not reached the level of understanding that we need, to see it as a critical mass, a critical element that we have to take care, and instead we are still in the poetic and abstract realms of perception.
I was giving a lecture to a school class once and I told them that they all share the air and then they all wanted to stop breathing, because they were like, 'Oh, my God!' And then they all looked at me like I was crazy. But it's reality and you just never think about it. So, the public really sees it as this abstract kind of thing. They don’t think about it deeply. However, I think through the pandemic that people have started to think more about this, this topic of sharing air and the virus, and, in turn, the problem of air pollution and our health has become clearer, more urgent.
There are more people dying from air pollution than from war but it is hard to get a real number as in many cases it is a silent killer, it builds up over time, then when someone has heart failure, the dots aren't drawn. However, there are more cases where it is being diagnosed and held accountable, bringing greater awareness into the public domain. That's also something for our societies to learn about. I think that we have that old question about what climate change is really about, how about our health is the human self, not the planetary health? Because our Earth will always somehow find a way to continue, without us, but the problem is that it's our home that we are destroying and in turn, we are also destroying our health. The two are intrinsically linked.
What is your personal relationship to the air element?
I live next to a little forest in the city of Linz. For me, it's super important to have fresh air coming in. I was in Iran, in Tehran, in 2016, and in this moment in Tehran my nose was bleeding, I really had the feeling I don't want to breathe anymore, because it was so disgusting. It was so hot, and there was so much pollution in the air that it really hurts when you breathe. This is a moment where I realised 'oh my god!' this is all manmade. And you see and feel the levels of pollution in the air. The inflow and outflow of the air just doesn't work anymore. You have this basin that the dust just always blows up against, and then falls down again, and it is impossible to get rid of it. So, this for me was the worst air conditions that I've ever experienced. And when I talk to the people living there, they are all really suffering from it, but at the same time, they're struggling with so much more.
Historically it wasn’t always this way. During the Industrial Revolution, of course, the air condition terrible because of the machinery. Nowadays, with modern technologies, this should no longer be necessary or acceptable. Still, the problem is through the continuing development, especially from high rise apartment buildings, and so on, they really block the natural flow that was possible before. Of course, there are other factors, but in general the problem is the topography of a city blocks the natural flow. The word Tehran means ‘good air’, and in former times it was from Shiraz that people travelled north to Tehran for the summer because it's close to the mountains and they could take in the good air. Now of course Tehran is completely overcrowded, and is no longer an ecological body. In that sense. It's an industrialised body, or ecosystem.
Participate in the AIR DIARY project
Breathe Earth Collective is Lisa Maria Enzenhofer, Andreas Goritschnig, Karlheinz Boiger, Markus Jeschaunig, Bernhard König