LISTENING AND READING GROUPS

Regular engagement with communities through listening and readings groups which navigate the ‘poetics of breath’. Collaborators are invited to bring written, heard, bodily and shared texts that resonate with them and the gesture of ‘poetics of breath’. All those who gather are guided through invitations to share in different ways through reading aloud, listening and gentle embodied practice (thinking with our bodies). We move from our breath(ing) bodies to breathe with textual resonates.

Current Listening and Reading Groups

‘Travelling’ Listening and Reading Groups - ‘Poetics of Textual and Bodily Breath’

Collaborators are invited to bring a text, quote or memory, that responds to ‘breath’. This can be something that has resonated; be it from another source or created yourself. 

The ‘text’ can be anything; poem, review, story, archival, academic text, aural, memory and beyond. 

In our shared spaces we explore ‘poetics of breath’ and how we breathe with bodily and textual breath, through reading aloud and guided embodied practice. Fragments from Chantel Akerman’s, My Mother Laughs and Edna O’Brien’s, A Pagan Place, act as anchors for the listening and reading groups. 

These are collective spaces, where I ask collaborators to engage in ways they feel comfortable. To come and go as needed. 

The text can be in any language. The events are facilitated in English with Irish. The events think with the exhibition at Jeu De Paume, Paris, Chantal Akerman, Travelling, which pays tribute to Belgian filmmaker, artist and writer Chantal Akerman.

Tsarino, Bulgaria | September 2024

Reading and Listening Groups in the outdoor kitchen and woods

We disorientate through repetitive performances.

We reorientate through textual breath.

This is our shared ‘poetics of breathing’.

Reading aloud in the air.

Listening with our bodies.

Collaborators who arrive at these listening and reading groups, are invited to introduce themselves

through

quotes,

poems,

stories,

songs,

collections of words,

lists,

memories,

bodily rememberings

and images.

We speak into our shared air.

We share air.

Traces are left in the spaces of these ‘performances’.

‘Soon, we will weave the space as we speak.

Together, we breathe these words,

inhaling and holding them,

if only for a second,

before we have to exhale again.

We do not determined the space that surrounds us,

between us,

that passes as shared air.

If only for a moment,

We breathe,

We move,

We feel.’

The listening and reading groups in Tsarino culminated in a communal exhibition at the Razklon Gallery in Tsarinio. Collaborators who arrived from the local community and visiting international volunteers and artists hand wrote fragments that spoke to the resonates of these listening and readings groups, and they were suspended in the air in Tsarino.

Tsarino Textual Breath | 23 September - 23 November

Regular Online Meeting Spaces - We Share Air.