Amid the Air and Earth

Atmospheric States

 


A transdisciplinary art, architecture and science research project investigating how atmospheric dynamics, pollution and their politics challenge fixed notions of the nation-state and sovereign borders on the land, and as experienced by different bodies.
    Atmospheric States is a collaboration between a place of their own and atmospheric scientist Dr Liz Coleman (NUI Galway), and our initial activities will take place across rural County Galway and the region of Connemara, where the Atlantic ocean meets western Ireland, at the Mace Head Atmospheric Research Station in Clara.



Atmospheric States will interrogate historical and contemporary apparatuses of scientific knowledge of the atmosphere, and how such apparatuses establish dominant narratives and understandings that inscribe colonial and capitalist imaginaries.  Our research and spatial art practice will ask how we might bring different knowledges together (science, art, architecture, popular culture, indigenous) to develop and test experimental apparatuses of the atmosphere, and to investigate the potential effects of such alter-apparatuses in different registers (cultural, political, imaginary etc.).   

 
NUI Galway’s Mace Head Atmospheric Research Station is a Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW) and Advanced Global Atmospheric Gas Experiment (AGAGE) site that provides online measurements of the atmospheric agents that cause climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion and air-pollution related health impacts. It is one of the most recognized and respected facilities both nationally and internationally.

In 2019-21 Atmospheric States contributed to the Architecture at the Edge Festival in Galway, with the project Aer Anála (The Air We Breathe)





Mark