Breath(ing) with ‘Histories that Hurt’
We Share Air’
Embodied Circular Readings
The timbre of my voice and breath vibrates between bodily and filmic bodies in our collective shared air to create temporal spaces of time out of kilter, to attend to ‘histories that hurt’ and move to the gift of future breath.
’Histories that hurt’
Sara Ahmed
Embodied Circular Reading | Tsarino Foundation AiR, Bulgaria
We breathe with the
autobiographical,
poetical,
archival,
polyphony of voices from previous readings,
‘performances’ in ‘public’ and ‘private’ air and filmic bodies.
We feel a fragment of an invitation into an embodied circular reading in this moment
These words were written collectively with Graduate Tutor and PhD researcher, Killian O’ Dwyer as part of counterfield, research and practice collective, where the embodied research first took seed amongst collective bodies. The words above formed through our shared breath over the dining room table at our writing residency in Brighton, in the duration of our living space.
I invite ‘yet-to-come’ collaborators to embodied circular readings, where situated Irish maternal breath expands outwards to encompass all those arrive, to breathe with other ‘histories that hurt’, and bodies that hold multiplicities of time/knowledges. We attend to the panicked body of transgenerational trauma and complexities of the unspoken/unsayable as public/private entangle; via invitations to listen, move, voice, engage with filmic bodies, where bodily breath and filmic breath collide.
Before undertaking this discovery together, and to enter with the energy of the Irish feminine that moves with me in my research and practice, I firstly draw attention to how the feminine is evoked. I align with Julia Kristeva’s focus on the
‘transformative potential of what she conceptualizes as the feminine: not femininity, not femaleness or womanhood ‘but a specific aspect of the human psyche which might be the proper engine of our capacity to change.’
I think from this thread positioned by The School of Materialist Research, The Feminine in an Age of Anthropological Transformation, which I joined in September 2024.
These intersectional feminist non-hierarchical spaces, invite collaborators at the embodied circular readings to conjure the physical structures as they desire, to move via the creation of ‘living conditions’ they arise, and to converse through breath and introduce themselves via bodies of water that have stayed with them.
‘listen with your body,
allow your memory spaces to flow to bodies of water that come to you,
that hold you,
that trouble you,
that disrupt,
that care,
that respond,
that elude,
that move amongst us.
The durational collective practice is essential for navigating bodily, psychic, relational and political histories that hurt. Embodied Circular Readings occur in places we dwell together over time, which hold reading and listening groups, that I facilitate, meals where we cook and share food together and the in-between sociability (Fred Moten and Stefano Harney) of these atmospheres.
The shared rhythm of dwelling together.
Examples of Previous Embodied Circular Readings
Knees to Stone, Three Secrets,
Tsarino AiR Foundation
Bulgarian Eastern Rhodope Mountains | Sept 2024
Before each embodied workshop, I send a letter of address which shares the affective terrains we will traverse. A letter to each collaborator who will arrive at the workshop space. An invitation to come and go as needed. At Tsarino, we wrote these letters as a communal practice. Translating them in each language that spoke into the air, Bulgarian, Greek, Dutch and English.
These are the letters waiting on our shared dinner table. This is our durational practice that carries communities along with ‘histories that hurt’.
Embodied Circular Reading moving through the air at Tsarino
We begin in our communal outdoor kitchen,
the plates returned cleaned and dried to the wooden shelves,
the vessels that held the Irish stew I cooked.
We find ourselves surrounded by cows,
that roam the Eastern Rhodope mountains,
we dance gently past their curious eyes.
We move together through the abandoned village,
inside,
outside houses,
climbing down towards the waterfall,
passing pine and oak trees,
our voices cling to the leaves.
Our bodies feel the cold welcome of water held in the stream,
a large beetle dives, down to the depths, back to the air
the water weaves, flows, trickles on its way to the waterfall.
We climb,
we share two cars,
we find ourselves at the vitrine,
which holds fragments of our words
from the reading and listening group that came before.
The sun is setting.
Our communal fire crackles into the night air,
mingling with distant Bulgarian music, and the chatty crickets.
The timbre of my voice joins the chorus.
Our communal voices tangle.
Our bodies respond to filmic breath between the firelight and our head touches.
My body disorientates, orientates, reorientates between the filmic body and my body.
Bodily and Filmic Breath
A new filmic body made in conversation with Tsarino
Screened in the workshop
Post card Dis/Comfort,
SMR Summer School, The Feminine in an Age of Anthropological Transformation,
Greece | Sept 2024
Post card Dis/Comfort, The Priest is in the Kitchen,
Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre (BOARC),
Liverpool | June 2024
Images show the rooms the embodied circular readings moved through, determined by the desires/needs of the collaborators and the space. There are no images of people from Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre to respect the collaborators that joined.
Disorientation at the Site of the Letter,
Goldsmiths University of London, London | May 2024
We move together through the inhale, interval to the exhale, ‘Being faithful to the spacing of breath, this ‘rhythm and melody of the universe’ (Irigaray 2004d, p. 50). By bringing consciousness to our breath, we gesture to the other, commune with the other and return to the self.
Reorientations
The mother and daughter relation becomes a site to think how we share air between two bodies and collective bodies. Opening spaces to commune in air through repetitive reorientations, where we find resilience and ways to thrive.
‘Tu’, ‘Vous’
We share air.
We dance with and are affected by the air around us, whilst forgetting the earth.
The embodied circular readings are shared spaces where I ask all those who arrive, to engage in ways they feel comfortable with.
To come and go as needed.
Since the embodied research and movement workshops held in collaboration with other artists, dancers and researchers, they have tangled and become the circular embodied readings as part of my research and practice, forming touches, knots and entanglements in my PhD between theory and art practice.
EMBODIED CIRCULAR READINGS
2024
‘Arrival of the Light’, Breath(ing) with ‘Histories that Hurt’ We Share Air’, Pedvale Art Park, Latvia | Dec 2024 – Jan 2025 (upcoming)
Disorientation at the Site of the Letter, Dublin TBC | 16 Nov 2024
Feminist Breath Collective, Spectral Walks, Embodied Readings, Breath Gardens, Somatic Experiencing, Dublin | Nov 2024
Knees to Stone, Three Secrets, Tsarino Foundation, Bulgarian Eastern Rhodope Mountains, Sept 2024
Post card Dis/Comfort, SMR Summer School, The Feminine in an Age of Anthropological Transformation, Greece | Sept 2024
Post card Dis/Comfort, The Priest is in the Kitchen, Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre (BOARC), Liverpool | Jun 2024
Disorientation at the Site of the Letter, Brockley | Apr 2024
Disorientation at the Site of the Letter, Goldsmiths University of London, London | May 2024
EMBODIED RESEARCH AND MOVEMENT WORKSHOPS
2024
‘The Feminine-to-Come and Filmic Breath of the Irish Catholic Maternal, Goldsmiths University, London |February 2024
2023
‘The Feminine-to-Come and Filmic Breath of the Irish Catholic Maternal, Goldsmiths University, London| December 2023
Research Café – Research in conversation with artist Esmeralda Valencia, Women’s Art Library, London| December 2023
‘The Feminine-to-Come and Filmic Breath, collaborative embodied research event, with researcher Sara Simić, Central European University, Goldsmiths |October 2023
2022
Counterfield workshops – Indeterminate Transmissions, Filmic Bodies and Bodies of Motion, collaborative embodied research event, with researcher Daphna Westerman and dancer, choreographer and curator Jiaying Gao, New Cross |October 2022
Archival - (Library of Ireland, Irish Film Institute, Radharc Archive and the London Metropolitan Archives)