My body/psyche moves with my grandmother’s engagement ring, her rosary and my aunt’s letter to my mother

The layer of ‘performances’, circle repeatedly the four mysteries of the rosary (touch of Irish Catholicism/states), (dis)orientating between (dis)comfort as private and public become porous. Each iteration reorientations our breathing bodies.

‘Private’ air, our voices (mother/me) (re)read (re)breathe through the rediscovery of a letter, which holds a revelation. My mother’s dementia, a doubling of affects that hold grief and laughter whilst opening of bodily/psychic remembering(s) previously silenced by shame. Dementia has become the unexpected relation, as I move with an unfolding choreography with my mother, over the dining room table in London, navigating the loss of bodily/psychic shame in my mother whilst I still breathe with the rituals of embodied shame.

‘Public’ air, my voice reads into ‘public’ air at sites of the rosary. A (un)heard voice mirroring the agnosia of the Irish maternal. 

Filmic bodies, sonic shared breath from the ‘public’ and ‘private’ air affect the speed of the visual/cuts in the filmic bodies, which are filmed at sites of the rosary. 

Embodied Circular Readings, the timbre of my voice vibrates between bodies in our collective air; we breathe with the autobiographical, poetical, archival, polyphony of voices and filmic bodies. These temporal spaces are mobilized by those who arrive and become part of the choreography of Irish maternal breath.

My practice deals with suspended breath, how we share air, and the gift of future breath, to seek reorientations of the Irish Catholic maternal, in the mother and daughter relation. Asking how we can collectively attend without judgement to the triggering of shame in the bodily, psychic, relational and political. (Read further embodied circular readings)

Each layer of ‘performance’ moves in differing intensities 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).