Holding Breath: Collective listening, care and connection in the wake of pandemic grief and chronic debilitation
inhale (to breathe in); exhale (to breathe out); inspire (to breathe in, inhale, to create or animate); respire (to breathe out, to breathe again; conspire (to breathe with others, together); aspire (to breathe, to suck in air; to approach, desire); expire (to exhale, to come to an end).
We are living in an ongoing state of breathlessness. The ‘mass disabling event’ (Mingus, 2022) of the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed our social, cultural, and political landscape; institutional responses in Australia and beyond have exacerbated already existing health inequalities, vulnerabilities, and injustices.
Responding to this context, “Holding Breath” is a creative community-based project that explores collective listening, care and creative connection in the wake of pandemic grief (and beyond) through a series of intimate, generative and reciprocal encounters through the making and sharing of short voice-note memos (sound recordings). The project will work co-creatively with women and non-binary people who experience debilitating or persistent breathlessness across unevenly shared and felt thresholds of experience.
The impetus for the project is borne out of my own experience of living with Long COVID and chronic illness / disability and of losing a loved one to COVID-19 (and witnessing the ways her gendered, racialised and chronically ill migrant body was constantly exposed to health inequities and lack-of-care during the pandemic) and is being developed during my postdoctoral research fellowship with the Big Anxiety Research Centre at UNSW Sydney. The project connects to recurring themes I’ve explored in my research using listening-oriented, sensory and sonic approaches and an interest in exploring border and threshold sites / practices. Breath is one such threshold.
How do we listen for that which constrains the breath? How do we listen for the breath that escapes constraint? (Brooks, 2021)
Through a series of co-designed listening interventions - or, to borrow Rajni Shah’s (2021) term ‘experiments in listening’ - and creative exchanges, it will engage with women and trans non-binary people to explore the unevenly shared and felt atmospheres of breathing, breath, and breathlessness. Foregrounding the politics of listening along with a feminist politics of collective respiration and attention to being-in-relation, it will develop and co-design a series of creative interventions exploring embodied and sensory experiences of breath, breathing and breathlessness. A ‘feminist respiratory politics’ (Górska, 2018; Tremblay, 2022) grounded in my own lived experience of breathlessness and disability will connect the relational, felt, and embodied dimensions of breathing with/in discomfort to broader socio-political structures and relations – including who has access to ‘care’, on what terms, and whose experiences and lives are prioritized, heard, and valued (Wong, 2020). In this context, questions of listening are vital.
Working co-creatively with communities of lived experience and using a range of co-creative, sensory and arts-based methodologies, the project aims to build space for collective witnessing across shared, yet distinct, sites of grief, loss, trauma, and debility and for listening across different thresholds of breathing and breath (socially, politically, affectively, experientially). It will attend to what gets in the way (following Ahmed, 2010) - breaths held, moments of pause, slowness, discomfort, distress - as vital disruptions that orient us towards alternative practices of care and repair. It aims to co-create space for solace and otherwise imaginaries grounded in slow attentiveness, generosity, and ethical encounters inspired by Disability Justice approaches to radical collective care (Kafai, 2021; Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018).
How might we conspire (to breath together) to collectively create the conditions where collective listening in the wake of grief, loss, and trauma is possible, but which also recognizes communities of grief are differentially afforded breathing space? How might we collectively listen across thresholds of experience to imagine more just and “breathable futures” (Górska, 2022)?
Intervention I: For a brief moment, held
Intervention II: Slow writing as embodied resistance (feminist writing collective)
Intervention II: Dwelling (together) in discomfort
Intervention III: Sonic intimacy, or listening with ‘feminist ears’
References:
Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press.
Brooks A, 2021, Five Propositions on Listening and Breath, Intermission: Reflection on a Year of Upheaval, Plysa G; Schulz M; Gulik M, (eds.), Unsound.
Górska, M. (2016). Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability. Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press.
Górska, M. (2018). Feminist Politics of Breathing. In Škof & P. Berndtson (Eds.), Atmospheres of Breathing.
Kafai, S. (2021). Crip Kinship: The disability justice and art activism of Sins Invalid. arsenal pulp press.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. L. (2018). Care Work: Dreaming disability justice. arsenal pulp press.
Shah, R. (2021). Experiments in Listening. Rowman & Littlefield.
Tremblay, J.-T. (2022). Breathing Aesthetics. Duke University Press.