Air: Singing and breathing together, in community
By Madeleine Kate McGowan, Safina Center Launchpad Fellow
Being alive now calls for strong communities. And at the moment I am finding my community on the Danish Island of Bornholm, where a circle of women, artists, dancers, filmmakers, all dealing actively with issues related to the climate crisis, are gathered on an old farm. A farm which is not functioning as a farm anymore, but where the stables have been turned into studios and ateliers for experimental art forms. The place is called BIRCA (Bækkenlund International Residency Center for Artists) and the residency is called The Climate Crucible. This text is a description of a process, but also an invitation to you dear reader, for a collaboration.
Still from video installation ‘Holding our Breath.’ Courtesy: Madeleine Kate McGowan
While being here on this magical Island, I am deepening my process with a video installation titled Holding our Breath, which I have been working on for several months now. Through this filmmaking process, I am seeking to activate a heightened sensitivity towards the element of Air, both in me and in the people participating in the film. I do this through the way I hold the camera, how I move with the camera, through dialogues, singing and breath-work and how I edit. With the process I am asking how I can use the artistic process as a method for bridging the human and the other-than-human? — so it doesn’t merely become the art product that potentially opens a sensitivity towards the other-than-human, but also the creation of it.
Still from video installation ‘Holding our Breath’. Courtesy: Madeleine Kate McGowan
I have travelled all over Denmark, meeting people in dialogue about their reflections on air and inviting people to sing together and breathe together. As a central inspiration to my song, camera and breath work, floats Juliana Spahr’s poem This Connection of Everyone with Lungs:
“…as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands
and the space around the hands and the space of the room and
the space of the building that surrounds the room and the space
of the neighbourhoods nearby and the space of the cities and the
space of the regions and the space of the nations and the space
of the continents and islands and the space of the oceans and
the space of the troposphere and the space of the stratosphere
and the space of the mesosphere in and out.
In this everything turning and small being breathed in and out
by everyone with lungs during all the moments.”
The poem takes me through a dynamic journey of words, where the writing establishes a rhythm and movement that becomes like the route of air through landscapes, spaces, and bodies. Floating and always touching something, repeatedly. The text describes air as always traveling and connecting all living beings, filling us and opening dynamics throughout landscapes. For all of us with lungs.
The past days it has been easy for me to film air, as it is making itself visible as wind. It is fiercely moving, touching leaves and branches. When filming I imagine that I am traveling the streams of air, circulating, wavy, touching, moving into portals and out again. It is as if I am becoming air when filming. The filming becomes this awkward choreography for me, which seen from afar probably looks very silly. I am playing with the idea of creating a wind-catching device, that I can wear while filming, so that I can feel the movements of air around me.
Still from video installation ‘Holding our Breath’, with Linh Le. Courtesy: Madeleine Kate McGowan
As poet Ocean Vuong writes in On Earth we’re Briefly Gorgeous: “How do we live a life worthy of our breath?”