Adam Hudec with Dusts Institute

What is the Air You Breathe?

 
 

About the Artist

Dusts Institute is an interdisciplinary research platform and community agency based in Vienna, Austria. Their research-based practice operates in between architecture, art, science, and activism where interdisciplinarity has become a tool to explore hidden or ignored anomalies of our urban environments. Dusts Institute proposes to focus their conversation on the places humans inhabit and on relationships with other life forms. Their aim is to develop a dialogue about ecological challenges and turn them into opportunities that actively transform our life and the life of the community. Since 2019, their activities have been represented in pop-up events on public spaces, workshops, performances, and educational gatherings while using self-developed collective tools and equipment exhibited in various biennials and exhibitions worldwide.

 

Artist statement

The previous 250 years have placed human needs at the center of all things, leading to great discoveries and advances. Despite this, it has also led to the destruction of our habitat and thus the fundamental crises with which we are now confronted. It arrived by the changing air composition; invisible deposits of our daily activities slowly, yet gradually, affected the air that we breathe and share with other life forms. Air connects us all and we are all entangled in it. This mode of coexistence puts us far beyond the long-established system that humans are separated from nature and all other life forms. We are not the impenetrable, self-contained beings we believe we are. We endeavour to close borders against viruses, people, and other nonhuman entities. However, this proves to be impossible.   

Dusts Institute proposes new ways of being in the world by providing an experience that is foreign to our senses: air without any dust, mites, microbes, or human-made deposits. Our pop-up event on Churchill Square named Dusts-free-Chamber offers the experience of breathing in a dust-free environment; a condition once taken for granted, nowadays is a pure utopia. After four minutes of therapeutic breathing practice inside the Dusts-free-Chamber, the moment of attunement comes while stepping out with the first breath. By opening our airways and harmonizing with the particle-free environment inside the structure, one realizes that we are not alone in the air. Moreover, our Dusts Collecting Workshop during the installation aims to collect, materialize and analyze what kind of particles are in the air we breathe. This D.I.T (Do It Together) project initiates an interactive outdoor walk around the neighbourhood of Churchill Square to retrieve knowledge about the local environment.