Conversation Room - Drawing Breath

Friday 27 April, 2.00pm - 4.30pm

“The air you just exhaled has already spread far and wide. The CO2 from a breath last week may
now be feeding a plant on a distant continent, or plankton in a frozen sea. In a matter of months
all of the CO2 you just exhaled will have dispersed around the planet.”

Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers

On Friday from 2.30pm 27 April, Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda invite you to a Drawing Breath event, to contribute to their breath collection. They are inviting museum goers to come to the Conversation room in Craigie Horsfield: Relation exhibition to literally draw breath, on large rolls of paper, as well as drawing breath into a microphone. It will be the world's largest collection of breath and we will use it to blow back global warming.

This is part of an ongoing project called Talking about the Weather. It is a project sparked by our own response to the terrifying spectre of global climate change. Sheer terror at the possibilities that are being talked about led us to ‘talking about the weather’. The weather, once a safe way for strangers to connect, is now fraught with an edge of danger as ominous signs of global warming multiply. In this project weathertalk is no longer a banal exchange of local weather forecasts, but instead we ask people to donate their breath - the breath which they would normally use to talk about the weather and the same breath that is spread far and wide as described by Tim Flannery. Working with breath expresses our connectedness to each other and the world around us – and it emphasises the dynamic nature of the atmosphere and our part in its creation and destruction. As Tim Flannery says, every breath you take makes you part of a dynamic system called the atmosphere, or the aerial ocean.

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