Skip to content

Onfoħ

Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on linkedin
LinkedIn

Breathing moves air in and out of the lungs. Oxygen goes in, carbon dioxide is flushed out. An exchange occurs within our internal environment. Onfoħ is an installation that explores the phenomenon of carbon emissions through human respiration.

Carbon emissions are loosely defined as the release of greenhouse gases and their precursors into the atmosphere over a specified area and time. This notion is usually linked to the burning of fossil fuels like natural gas, crude oil, and coal. In short—human activity.

From the very beginning, humans have altered their environment. In fact, an average person takes 12 to 20 breaths per minute, amounting to an average of 23,040 breaths per day. The world’s population collectively breathes out around 2500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, around 7% of the annual carbon dioxide tonnage produced by burning fossil fuels.

Although the carbon dioxide produced through breathing is part of a closed loop in which our output is matched by the input from the food we eat, it can be used as a metaphor to visualise other unseen outputs from other man-made sources: transportation, electricity, heating, water consumption, food production.

Onfoħ was designed to engage citizens and address an overwhelmingly challenging environmental problem of our time—our inability to visualise our own carbon footprint. The work does this by showing that which is usually unseen—the physical manifestation of carbon emissions.

The installation consisted of five plinth-like structures, each housing a glass container of lime water. Stencilled onto the pillars were illustrations of lungs, each consecutive pair having decreased surface areas, conveying a sense of degeneration. When the audience interacted with the installation, breathing into the lime water and adding carbon dioxide, they triggered a chemical reaction that produced insoluble calcium carbonate. The clear solution turned milky, making the invisible visible.

Humans contribute constantly to carbon-based, hazardous waste production, and the installation demanded that they face that reality.

Note: The installation was displayed as part of a collective exhibition entitled Human Matter, hosted by the Malta Society of Arts at the end of last year. David Falzon, Matthew Schembri and Annalise Schembri teamed up to work on this artwork as soon as they finished reading for an MFA in Digital Arts (Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences, University of Malta).

Author: David Falzon

Author

More to Explore

Fostering Creativity and Community: The ART Connect Project at the University of Malta Library

The Library is, in many ways, the beating heart of the University of Malta (UM). The pulse of intellectual life can be felt most profoundly amongst the quiet shelves lined with books and the many students and academics lining the Library’s work desks with their noses deep in their projects. In this sense, the Library is also symbolic of the University’s overall health and vitality, so it is important to balance serious work with serious play.

The evolution of the ART Connect Project has been a journey of dedication and transformation. Inspired by the vision of new librarians and a desire to revamp the Library’s decor, what was once a seed of an idea has now matured into a vibrant platform for artistic expression, collaboration, and community building.

The ART Connect Project aims to connect people through creativity, foster collaboration, and transform spaces, inviting artists and art enthusiasts to celebrate the power of art.

Meeting Challenges Halfway at the Malta Book Festival 2023

Malta boasts 58 registered publishing entities, hosting hundreds of authors writing books across a wide swathe of genres and formats. These numbers emerge from an NSO survey into the book industry, conducted on the basis of the year 2021. Effectively, we could say that there are ‘more authors than churches’ in Malta, with over 700 authors populating the National Book Council’s database.

This hints at a varied industry, the stakeholders of which all fall under the remit of the National Book Council, which seeks to assist, support, and represent Maltese authors and publishers, as well as related industry stakeholders such as translators and illustrators. While the Maltese context does have its own particularities, neither is it immune to the industry’s wider, global realities, a case in point being the price hike on paper caused by the war in Ukraine, which continues to be felt across the board. Maltese publishers must also bear the brunt of this unfortunate phenomenon.

The National Book Council continues to advocate for increased governmental support to aid publishers, whether in this particular challenge or others, and it also offers direct financial aid through the Malta Book Fund, which last year issued a grand total of €120,000 to various industry stakeholders, targeting projects of high cultural value which may not have a straightforward route to market success.

But while some challenges may be met halfway through financial incentives, others require a systemic — or cultural — shift in attitude from all parties involved, which takes a certain degree of workshopping to be borne out. The slow uptake of ebooks bears pondering (the NSO survey saw 146 new ebooks issued in Malta in 2021, contrasted with printed counterparts of 418 in the same year), as does the worryingly high number of authors published without adequate contracts in place.

Maximising Solar Panel Efficiency: The DustPV Project

The DustPV project, led by Prof. Ing. Joseph Micallef, aims to determine the optimal timing for cleaning solar panels using innovative sensor technology and weather data analysis. By addressing the challenges of dust accumulation on photovoltaic panels, the project seeks to enhance solar panel performance and contribute to Malta’s renewable energy goals.

No comment yet, add your voice below!


Add a Comment