Feminist Breath Collective

Embodied, Somatic Movement, Filmic and Sonic

Who

Our artistic-research collective oscillates interchangeably between practice and theory to feel intervals of touches between our individual practices and how they expand to other artists, cultural professionals, communities, and architectural and natural atmospheres. We are four artists, researchers and writers who share air to collectively explore ‘yet-to-come’ feminist breath in our Embodied, Filmic and Collective Practices. We explore gestures and entanglements between our differing practices to ask how we can collectively attend, without judgment, to the triggering of shame, grief and loss in the bodily, psychic, relational and political in the atmospheres we find ourselves in. Facilitation permeates all our practices, opening multi-directional participation that ‘puts in play’ atmospheres, allowing us to share air together without fear. Our processes are rooted in the ecological and the ‘feminine-to-come’, the within but not yet, to collectively seek relations anew. The ‘feminine’ that moves within our practices is evoked in alignment with Julia Kristeva’s focus on transformative potential, which she conceptualizes as not femininity, not femaleness or womanhood ‘but specific aspects of the human psyche, which might be the proper engine of our capacity to change.’

Collaborators: 

Marie Theresa Crick

Marie Theresa Crick works with transnational feminisms and breath as ‘performance’. Her practice and research explore Embodied, Filmic and Collective Practice in dialogue with the philosopher, Luce Irigaray. She is a queer interdisciplinary artist, writer, researcher and facilitator (b. Croydon and of Irish descent, which she says with a smile). She is a PhD researcher in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University, fellow of Advanced Practices PhD and member of the research and practice collective Counterfield. Her practice deals with suspended breath, how we share air, and the gift of future breath. It seeks reorientations of the Irish Catholic maternal, in the mother and daughter relation and asks how we can collectively attend without judgment to the triggering of shame in the bodily, psychic, relational and political.

Alice-Anne Psaltis is a researcher interested in image politics, memory, and walking practices. Her recent work uses walking as a method of re-examining submerged histories and familial stories of place. Alice-Anne grew up on the unceded lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal peoples, Meanjin/Brisbane and now lives and works in London. She holds an MA Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, University of London, and has worked as an educator at Whitechapel Gallery, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and the University of Queensland Art Museum.

Michèle Saint-Michel  

Michèle Saint-Michel is a filmmaker, intermedia artist, and poet based in London. She works around issues of power, feminist ecologies, somatic memory, and quantum mechanics often addressing ache, grief and loss, longing and desire. Trained in classical ballet and modern dance, and later as a writer and filmmaker, Saint-Michel’s works often use language, movement, and sound to encourage curiosity and gentle coping. Working across poetry film, Fluxus sound, somatic movement, and books, her works construct paradoxical tensions within polytemporalities, foregrounding healing, softening as resistance, and the poiesis of more care-full futures. Saint-Michel is the author of four books, a set of journals, and a colouring book.

Hannah Wroe

Hannah Wroe is an artist-researcher based in London. She was born in York and grew up between Manchester, Yorkshire, Essex and Cyprus. Her research centres on critical ecologies, feminisms and body politics, with an interest in the anti-colonial stories we can gather from plant histories. Her largest research project has focused on silences and redactions in the travel diaries of colonial botanical painter Marianne North. Her interest in botany grew organically from childhood where she spent time in Cyprus playing outdoors in nature. Her work is influenced by feminist-Marxist theorist Silvia Frederici and the embodied phenomenological approach of Merleau Ponty.

Practice and Research

Feminist and Queer Workshops, Listening and Reading Groups

Spectral Walks 

Alice-Anne Psaltis leads spectral walks. Participants (re)walk places in their memories as a way of (re)connecting with stories, knowledges, traumas, and imaginaries that may linger in place. We will then come together to share our experiences through physical walks that draw on the histories and relics of a site. Through this process of walking and (re)walking, we will breathe memories into the site, allowing them to (re)root and form collective understandings and (re)mappings of place. 

Embodied Circular Readings 

Marie Theresa Crick offers embodied circular readings, where situated Irish maternal breath explodes outwards to encompass all those that arrive, to breathe with other ‘histories that hurt; and bodies that hold multiplicities of time/knowledges and the atmospheres we find ourselves in as we navigate the park collectively. We will 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. The readings are determined by the desires of the ‘yet-to-come’ collaborators and the traces and residues of the architectural and nature spaces of the site they occur as they breathe with Irish diaspora histories. 

Breath Gardens

Hannah Wroe creates ‘breath gardens’ as spaces of communing/commoning. She has an interest in the remedial and ritualistic qualities of plants and how the silences and omissions around these knowledges can [re]tell our collective stories and histories. Plants and gardens are often sites of communing/commoning, from the commons of the feudal system, used by women for medicine making and foraging, to community allotments and city gardens. Focusing on plants that aid the respiratory system, she will create ‘breath gardens’ as sites to commune, to breath with nature and in-line with the feminine breath, and to [re]collect our feminine-plant histories and knowledges. Alongside this she conducts research into the feminist histories of the plants in garden sites. 

Somatic Experiencing

Michèle Saint-Michel hosts a series of somatic activations with participants based on somatic experiencing that invites all to explore their own interiority through somatic experiencing. The focus on interiority and embodied experiences creates a palimpsest for the scores we keep in our bodies. All will be guided through a somatic exercise focused on creating attunement of shared air. The exercises are filmed on 16mm film using a Bolex, hand processed, and then edited into a final somatic film.