We put a lot of value on stupid stuff like trainers and caviar and NFTs of monkeys, but our most essential resources – air and water – are treated like they’re worthless. That’s probably because they’re free; and if big businesses can’t make a few bucks out of them, they may as well pollute them to death. So as pollution slowly robs us of breathable air, the Wellcome looks at art and archival scientific material that can help us parse the senseless choking of humanity.
A stack of concrete blocks by David Rickard as you walk in symbolises the weight of all the air in the gallery. Air is heavy, physical stuff. Chunks of 3.5 billion-year-old fossilised reefs show how the oceans oxygenated the Earth and made it habitable, while paintings of plankton by Irene Kopelman capture how essential microscopic organisms are to our existence, then Matterlurgy’s installation of spinning pollution particles shows just how suffocating the environment has become.
A picture emerges here of air as a political substance, how the poor live in the most polluted places, how toxic air overwhelmingly impacts the most vulnerable, how skies are divided between nation states.
This is air as a weapon, and Forensic Architecture are calling for disarmament
It makes for grim viewing, but it feels important. Especially when you get to the heart of the show, Forensic Architecture’s excellent ‘Cloud Studies’ film installation. The group uses forensic techniques to investigate global injustices. They use witness videos to develop time stamps of Israeli bombs on Gaza by scanning the shapes of debris clouds, measure the impact of tear gas in Cairo, petrochemical pollution in Louisiana, chlorine bombs in Syria. This is air as a weapon, and Forensic Architecture are calling for disarmament.
As usual with them, they’re let down by an insistence on baffling, meaningless, waffly language – calling clouds ‘experiential conditions of optical blur and atmospheric obscurity’ means nothing and only pushes viewers away, which is a shame, because their work is important, it’s essential. And what they’re saying – what the whole show is saying – is that air matters and we need to start fighting for it, or we’ll all be left gasping.
