L’air pour l’air
SO-IL, in collaboration with Ana Prvački, debuted L'air pour air on the occasion of the second edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2017.
Architectural firm SO-IL and artist Ana Prvački will present their piece, L’air pour l’air at Garfield Park as one of several art and architecture collaborations. The title plays on the 19th century French statement l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake) that called for the progressive pursuit of artistic practice against conservative conventions of the status quo—in other words, change through beauty. The substitution of ‘air for the air’ suggests that the we might reconsider the medium of air in its own terms. SO-IL and Prvački have designed and constructed a series of dramatic wearable enclosures—part mask, part shelter—built out of air-filtering mesh materials designed to be worn by street musicians in polluted cities. The duo will explore the relationship between the senses and collective experience with a series of performances by musicians playing a piece composed by Veronika Krausas specifically for wind instruments and voice. Through their performance-based interactions with the wearable filtration enclosures, the musicians will “clean the air that produces the music.”
