As unremarkable as breathing

'As unremarkable as breathing' is a context-specific intermedial artwork exploring the public space of central Vitoria (Spain), commissioned and developed across research residency periods supported by AZALA (Vitoria, Spain) and Artium (Vitoria, Spain), for initial presentation as part of the public art programme Proklama 2016. The work being created within Brookes' ongoing collaboration with Spanish artist and performer Rosa Casado, as the culmination of their long-term 'Just a little bit of history repeating' project.

Drawing on the experience and approaches developed across this internationally commissioned series of works within social city spaces, 'As unremarkable as breathing' considers how we use and inhabit a city – through the small and mundane things that we do, and have done, to make that city usable for ourselves. The work explores the daily and often unconsidered things that shape our behaviour and environment, and help to build the social and functional ecology of the places where we live together. Across a public research residency the authors have worked with local residents to identify places and objects within the city that might reveal aspects of Vitoria’s evolving socio-diversity – in an attempt to identify and record sites active within moments of Vitoria's shifting daily landscape, that might help to highlight endangered or even now extinct behavioural possibilities amongst the things that now happen within the city’s public spaces.

The resulting mediated traces and records of those sites and explorations, and their public presentation and publication, constitute a developing intermedial artwork that marks the fifth and potentially final phase of exploration within the author's long-term 'Just a little bit of history repeating' project.