It is a basic element for the survival of the planet and the life of any living being. However, in general, humans rarely become fully aware of the air we breathe, this ethereal element that surrounds us. We did it, almost forced, during the Covid-19 pandemic and we also tend to pay attention every time the news reminds us of its poor quality: every year there are seven million premature deaths due to environmental pollution, about 400,000 in Europe.
The different spaces of the Bòlit, the Center for Contemporary Art of Girona, host an exhibition that invites the viewer to rethink their relationship with this ambivalent and intangible element formed by a mixture of gases. And it does so from the perspective of eight artists from different disciplines, training and artistic languages (engraving, video-essay, multimedia, sound and musical installations, sculptures...). A challenge for the creators of the works, since as one of the curators of the exhibition, Ingrid Guardiola, explains, “air, being invisible and ethereal, is a very complicated thing to capture in art. Furthermore, it is very difficult to raise awareness about what cannot be seen with one's own eyes.”
Despite everything, the exhibition, which can be visited until May 19, makes the invisible visible, seeks to stir consciences and invites visitors to ask themselves questions. For example, the audiovisual artist Fito Conesa addresses in his montages the environmental and ecological impact of a contaminated planet. In his video and musical works he explains the problems of the Mediterranean Sea, such as overfishing or the impact of cruise ships, with a video that is an opera in three acts. He also brings the viewer closer to the life of a small industrial town in northern Quebec, which lives off the copper refinery, through a visual requiem. The images of daily life in the city, filmed by himself, are interspersed with others that show the contamination of an area where 30% of its inhabitants suffer from cancer.
For her part, the artist Núria Merino captures in engravings the space that remains between bodies, and the mathematician and physicist Pep Vila captures in one of his montages the air of 22 cities in each of the countries in which Amazon has warehouses. He does this by displaying in different boxes small fragments of the bubble wrap that wrap the products he receives, which he returns to the distribution centers with paper that contains the air from his studio.
In another installation, the conceptual artist emulates Marcel Duchamp's famous piece Air de Paris, a gift for collector Walter Arensberg made with the air of the French capital. The physicist is also able to measure the volume of air contained in an amber stone from millions of years ago. Mireia Saladrigues focuses, through a video essay, on the microparticles of dust suspended in the air from the breakage of a Carrara marble sculpture, while the artist and researcher trained in physics Abelardo Gil-Fournie r shows in different videos images of trees swaying by the wind.
The exhibition also brings out the sound and musical dimension of the air with the help of Job Ramos and the singer Maria Arnal, author of a polyphonic aria that invites us to reflect on who owns the air and who is responsible for protecting it.
