learning how to breathe was a sonic artwork and performance birthed from Janilda Bartolomeu’s fascination with the whaling histories connecting the Azores and Cabo Verde, the act of puncturing lungs, and the relation in breathing. It is a rumination on breathing in circumstances that should be impossible. We live in a global order that feeds on the violence which prevents us — human, non-human, living beings in general — from breathing. An order in which the dreams of one simply devour the other’s. By embracing one of the regenerative states of collective living, grief, the work seeks a path towards an existential dependence with respirational knowledge as its compass. In a fragile and finite collaboration, Janilda Bartolomeu and singer Lily Spencer harmonise in two transmuting iterations of breath: poetry and singing. Passing by reflection, in relation and in ritual.

This piece was inaugurated and activated with a performance during the Symposium weekend.