Exposition Breathless – Andrea Polli

Considered among the protagonists of the so-called “extreme” ecological art, in her first Italian Personal Show, Andrea Pollipresents a series of works that explore the integrated dialectic of different media, offering different interpretations of data taken from natural contexts. The works shown, made in collaboration with Chuck Varga, arise from measurements of the quality of environmental air. These were taken in teamwork with scientists and meteorologists and, through a process known as “sonification”, sensitive systems were developed to understand different natural phenomena.

In Breathless, atmospheric pollution, melting glaciers, global warming, or a simple storm, are living testimonies to the climate change we are going through. The climate variations analysed and interpreted by Polli, seen also as being signs of the cultural changes that have accompanied the history of man’s evolution, amount to an investigation of the impact of the climate on the future of life, at both the local and the global level.

In Breather and Cloud Car, site-specific environmental installations in the PAV courtyard, based on an old Fiat 500 and a Fiat 126 – runabouts chosen as symbols of the great Italian economic boom – the artist extends the relationship between man and nature to include the wider social context. In Breather, the car is covered with a transparent dome that, thanks to a system that inflates it or expels the air, acts like a lung stretched to suffocation. In Cloud Car the car is fitted with a misting device – this, too, activated by movement sensors as visitors pass by – that makes the air into something tangible and visible.

The weather dimension appears clearly since from the entrance of PAV, when the public have to cross Particle Falls, a flowing waterfall of lights that shows real-time air quality data, captured by a nephelometer, processed by a software and finally projected onto a wall. Then, the wrapping sounds from the series Atmospherics/Weather works, here presented as a four-channel sound installation Within this sound environment, the videos of the installations put in place in New York, New Delhi and San Jose give a proper context to the work by Andrea Polli and at the same time expand her work to a global range, as they are global all the results of behaviours, development directions and life-styles that human beings are imposing on the planet.

Lastly, in the PAV project room, the video-documentary Ground Truth, shot during a scientific enterprise in South Pole, and N., video representation of the atmospheric data at North Pole, are shown as images from places that are remote, extreme and rarefied places but yet strictly connected to our daily life’s places, as they are all equidistant from the central issue of global eco-balance.

PAV – Living Art Park,
28^th October 2011- 26^th February 2012
Via Giordano Bruno 31, 10134 – Torino (Italy)
Wednesday – Friday, 13.00 – 18.00
Saturdays and Sundays, 12.00 – 19.00
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