346 Breathe In, Breathe Out installation

Date: March 2020
Designed by: Mirna Udovčić

This spatial installation was created as a competition entry for an exhibition in a Zagreb gallery. The designer has a long fascination with the relationship between clothes and the internal climate of buildings.

“The idea of the installation is to create layers of air. Air is a fluid, a mixture of substances: it transmits odors, allergens, disease germs, it is dry or moist, it transmits sound. Space is divided by anti-dust foil into layers so that in each layer one can feel one of its peculiarities: hot radiator, boiling water, stinking fish. When quarantine ensued, the installation took on a new dimension. These layers are also small air containers, a kind of a safe quarantine space. The excessive use of nylon or plastic may be the material expression of the quarantine and infection, which led to an experiment with those materials.

While experimenting with anti-dust and thermal foils in the living room, trying to reconstruct the idea, the author spontaneously found herself in a “clean air” bubble, wearing a thermal, aseptic cloak. The cloak, the foil backdrop, and the golden earrings merged like a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. The author took pictures and animated the photos into a gif. The removed elements of identity on her face are also the door to the virus.”