SO-IL and Ana Prvački

Los Angeles and New York, United States

BIENNIAL PROJECT

L’air pour l’air

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.”

BIO

In her videos, services, concoctions and drawings, Ana Prvački uses a gently pedagogical and comedic approach in an attempt to reconcile etiquette and erotics. She aims for a conceptual practice with a low carbon footprint. Florian Idenburg is founder of SO-IL, an architecture firm in New York.

Biennial Project: SO-IL and Ana Prvački, L’air pour l’air, 2017. Photo courtesy of Chicago Architecture Biennial / Tom Harris