As I breathe in and out through a microphone, a speaker vibrating with amplified, tiny sounds of my throat, saliva, breath is passed person to person. I follow it as it moves, each person holding it if/for as long as they want to. Sometimes I feel like there’s sound moving between bodies, not my breath/their breath but a sonic between-space, sometimes aloneness/separation, sometimes something else; back-and-forth moments with breath that is loud, soft, quick, slow, pausing and shifting responding to the moving speaker. The work can often be awkward, clumsy, difficult, extremely tiring, I am inviting the bodies of the audience to be in this space with me.
This work is informed by working without words with young people; by exploring death work in community; by breathing together in spaces of solidarity, protest, kinship; by experiences with people at end-of-life and the gap between breaths where one day I will likely not breathe in. And there is the call for death work for the structures of violent, neoliberal systems (Vanessa Machado de Oliveira/Narinder Bazen/Shivani Narang). Where is this collective gap? can I/we be present there?
Bridge Breathing 20:30 (in the gap, are we there), performance, Lightbeams Under A Bridge, Street Soundsystem, May and September 2024.
in the gap, are we there (4), performance, Hospice Architecture and Design, curated by Lucia Crowther, January 2025
in the gap, are we there (3), performance, The Drawing Room, gathering for The Earth Is Knot Flat curated by Emma McNally.
in the gap, are we there, text and sound work for a row of trees, The Journal of The Sonic Art Research Unit, with Patrick Farmer.
extract from text, in the gap are we there, a row of trees, Journal of The Sonic Art Research Unit, curated by Patrick Farmer