This project stems from the belief that art should play a role in connecting communities and dealing with important issues such as clean air.
Led by Roberta De Caro, a group of fellow students from City & Guilds of London Art School have turned the community project CleanAIR Space into a work of relational and performance art whereby members of the community engage in teaching each other how to improve indoor air quality by making their own ‘highly sophisticated air filters’ (potting spider plants cuttings);
In 2018 we have received an award by City & Guilds of London Art School which allowed us to create our first two performances and participatory art projects in April and June 2018 at Pullens Yards Community Centre and at Lambeth Palace Gardens. We received and managed to give in adoption over 200 plants and mapped their movements on a giant London map. We have created connections that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
Spider plants are listed in the NASA Clean Air Study as air-filtering plants. They are ideal plants because they reproduce easily and quickly and need very minimal attention. We are collecting cuttings from the community and spreading them further encouraging those who participate to keep the sharing going.
The sharing of spider plants is quite common as they are so prolific. With this participatory art project we are creating an arena where they can be spread wider for their air filtering properties through people’s interaction. We join a movement of artists “who are rejecting the product orientation of consumer culture and finding even more compelling ways of weaving environmental and social responsibility directly into their work’ (Suzi Gablik “Connective Aesthetics: Art after individualism” in Mapping the Terrain, 87).
We are spreading clean air by building community through art!
Huge thanks to artists :
Mils Bridgewater, Flora Malpas, Millie Fitzgerald and Lucy Kenner for collaborating on this project and truly making it possible.
Thanks to City & Guilds of London Art School for awarding us the ‘Student Initiated Project Prize’ 2018 and for the invaluable support and guidance freely given.
Thanks to Change Up @ Kennington Cross for providing the space for the event.
And of course THANK you to all those who have donated spider plant cuttings and to those who have adopted them with the promise to keep spreading clean air in the community
The next CleanAir Space event is on Saturday 26th November 2022 @ Mother Goose Garden Wanley Rd SE5 8AT in collaboration with artist Hannah Littlejones