‘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.

Each ‘performance’ sits in the durational time spent at London at the dining room table and moments of rupture as we move to the living room. Each iteration moves as its desires through the space, bodily tracings through the atmospheres it breathes.

My breath from the ‘Private’ Performances is felt in the filmic bodies, layered over the ‘Public’ Performances.

Gestures,

Voice,

Breath,

Air,

Ear,

Temporal Rituals.

‘My mother and I, drink tea in the living room. My mother’s living room, the front room. My father banished upstairs. This drinking of tea in the front room, an activity which would not have been permitted before. We drink out of mugs, my grandmother’s teacups and saucers no longer feel the air outside of their cupboard in the dining room French Dresser. Many of our ‘performances’ in English air, have disappeared. We sit opposite each other. Your gaze, distracting moves from my face to the window behind me. Watching the neighbours. The red curtains frame the bay window of your London house. You are always concerned with the activities of your neighbours. Even now.

I move across the room, to sit beside you, on the red sofa. The proximity feels at odds. An uncomfortable air. A new movement between us. We flick through a family photograph album. The family album has brought us close. I hear your breaths. We breathe with the departed. Their air circulates. The cloth of your top touches the skin of my left arm. This family album holds photographs of all the gravestones of those departed. They arrive to us as we flick through. All your aunts, cousins, your mother, your sister, your father…’