Which was the status of the project when the state of alarm was declared?
When the Covid-19 state of alert was declared, we were about to go to do two air mapping workshops in Venice with students from the IUAV di Venezia University. A workshop with analog tools and passive sensors organized by OpenSystems-University of Barcelona, and another with the Smart Citizen Kit developed by Fab Lab Bcn-IAAC and the Ideas for Change team. The two workshops were postponed sine die. Now it seems quite likely that we will be able to hold the workshops in the spring of 2021.
The installation was ready and is now in storage until we can resume its assembly and officially open the Venice Architecture Biennale on May 22, 2021.
The investigation that I commissioned, as the curator of the project, to the 300,000 Km/s team led by Mar Santamaria and Pablo Martínez and their article with the results and a cartography was about to go to print. We stopped the printing to give us time to reflect and incorporate what was happening.
This crisis has made us look at the world with new eyes, or perhaps open our eyes to issues that were there but to which, perhaps, we had not paid enough attention. What role does the air play in all these?
It is actually in the air where today’s biggest crises occur: the global climate crisis and the local public health crisis in cities caused by fossil fuel emissions. Crisis to which that caused by Covid-19 adds on.
All these crises are interrelated. According to the latest scientific studies (including Harvard University and Aarhus University), there is a correlation between the major numbers of Covid-19 cases and cities with populations exposed for years to higher levels of air pollution than those allowed by the WHO.
The feeling that we cannot breathe in the most literal and metaphorical sense is spreading globally.