is an anti-pollution performance artwork responding to my lived experience of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

I wanted to experiment with three slogan backpacks and decided to create three prototypes, pictured right. I repurposed old sheets, cut the material into three equal rectangles each measuring 75 x 90cm to cover my backpack. I then painted the fabric with yellow fluorescent paint and once it was dry, painted the slogans with black acrylic paint. I like painting the signs by hand. Although, each one takes about three hours to make, it gives time to engage in deep listening (Oliveros 1999) and enables me to concentrate my thinking and block out background noise – a very therapeutic process.

The second part of the process involved going to site-specific locations (Kwon 2004), busy roads in my local area – East Dulwich, Dulwich and Herne Hill – during the rush hour. I was filmed wearing different slogans on my back for an hour at a time. The footage was edited for my sustainable strategies film Backpack protest and How does your garden grow? which again responds to Oliveros’s practice of deep listening. This time the listening notices the difference in the sounds between the garden, busy roads and the sky and invites the viewer to hear the contrast.