Our presentation „Meandering nearby Breathing“ opens up the current phase of our „Breathing With“ project.
In recent months we have been dealing with issues including the conditionality of breathing across generations; the relation between corporeality, writing, and breathing; the knowledge of the hands that emerges in the bodyworks of Ilse Middendorf and Marion Rosen; the status of voices other than our own in the research process.We have continued to be invested in the challenge of hosting various angles and sources (interviews, body-work guidance, sound including recorded voice, writing of text, reading of discursive material) with the aim of testing the necessary fiction of equality(1): a spatial-temporal-conceptual equality of the differently structured modes of knowing nearby breathing. Through this process we came to recognize that one driving force of the inquiry is the question of our research methodology, which for now we frame as follows: “The method of our research is carried by a motion of hesitation. To hesitate gives us the space we need to think in minor terms, to slow down, and sense the moment before a decision is taken. This opens up options; we have a choice. The hesitative gesture reflects, in our minds, a choreographic thinking where space is created through contingency: meandering, we encounter various modes of worlding(2) and shades of subjectivities that correspond to the liveliness of breathing rhythms.”

In the presentation „Meandering nearby Breathing“ we probe a temporality where foreground and background are in constant flux: where different lines and particles of situated embodied knowledge with breathing create correspondences. Within this further speculative approach to the topic of breathing, we embrace all beginnings and hesitations as situations that build the research, that form the methodology amid the question of how hands-writing-speaking-breathing detect tensions and knots as thresholds of a multitude of knowledge experiences.

(1) See: Hito Steyerl, https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/kunst/interview-mit-der-kuenstlerin-hito-steyerl-14587945-p3.html
(2) See: Christoph Brunner & Ines Kleesattel. “Earthly Relational Aesthetics”, in Polyphone Ästhetik, ed. Sofia Bempeza et al. (Vienna: transversal texts, 2019).

The presentation is facilitated by Miriam Jakob and Jana Unmüßig with Lisa Densem as a guest. Artistic dialogue and technical assistance: Felix Claßen. Thanks to: Martial Duvoisin, Claudia Feest, Sumi Jang, Hiltrud Lampe and Petra Wikström