Category: Breath in Literature & Art

Living Anatomy is the title of a workshop held by artist/educator Catherine Lamont-Robinson in the context of the Catch your Breath exhibition. In this blog post she writes about the experience:

“Living Anatomy was a drop-in workshop that took place in during Fun Palaces at Barton Hill Settlement in Bristol on Saturday 5 October 2019. Led by myself and medical student Joshua Grover, we wanted to explore with visitors the magical inner-working of our bodies through art, movement, and sound. The focus of the session was to invite participants to access multi-sensory knowledges through embodied engagements with their breath.

In his blog post This Wearable Plant Cleans The Air For You When Pollution Is Bad, journalist Stan Alcorn interviewed the artist Chiu Chih about his “Survival Kit for the Ever-Changing Planet”:

„Art echoes life for a designer whose “Survival Kit for the Ever-Changing Planet”–photographed on a polluted day in China–sends a poignant message about environmental degradation and resilience.

It’s a simple and poignant concept: A tiny plant in a transparent backpack as the sole source of sustenance in a bombed-out world. Chiu Chih’s “Survival Kit for the Ever-Changing Planet” bounced around the design web on the strength of these images, with only glimmers of information about their provenance. But the artist’s backstory make it all the more interesting.

In October I was in London, to visit friends and to attend Jayne Wilton‘s workshop at the „Catch your breath“ exhibition at the London College of Physicians. Jayne is the resident artist of the Life of Breath Project and I‘d met her at the launch of the project in Durham university, 2015. So this was a happy reunion for us. I went with my friend Vanessa Mildenberg, a theatre artist and change and communications manager. We first participated in the workshop and then went on a guided tour of the exhibition.

Jayne‘s workshop consisted of four activities: a global breath- brushstroke project which I‘ll write about in the next post “Breathe with me”, a breath lithograph, an articulation sculpture and capturing breath bubbles.

The TV series Orange is the New Black gives a hilarious and disturbing example of how breathing techniques today are instrumentalized by a corporate performance pressure mindset. In season 4, episode one, Litchfield prison, the setting of Orange is the New Black, has been taken over by the private corporation MCC. Part of MCC‘s measures to increase the profit margins of their share holders is to double the prison population and installing four beds to a bunk instead of two. (Previously, funds for the prison were embezzled for a political career; this was still considered illegal.) In the first assembly of all the prisoners in the prison chapel, the prison ward, re-labelled „Director of Human Activity“, Mr Caputo, gives a corporate lingo speech, selling the installation of outdoor toilets as a courtesy and cheerily offering the customary freebie: in this case a set of earplugs. A breathing technique exercise is supposed to help the inmates manage their stress levels in the overcrowded conditions. The new Captain of the Guards from a maximum security prison, Mr Piscatella, instructs the inmates to breathe in on the count of five etc which doesn‘t go down well…

A friend of mine, dance teacher Melanie Jung, kindly sent me a link to Natalia Doco‘s song Respira, („Breathe“) with a very cute video. I‘ve translated the lyrics from the original mix of French and Spanish, more or less correctly, I think, into English and am sharing it here, after the video.

Respira
Alors, alors je respire
Même si la tête s’enferme dans le noir
Alors, alors je respire et même si le cœur ne bat plus pour moi, Ha, ay
Alors, alors je respire même si ce monde no entiende nada
Alors, alors je respire
Et respire même si le ciel todavia no clara

I just watched Collateral again, an action thriller produced and directed by Michael Mann. In the brilliant screenplay by Stuart Beattie, I discovered a breathing scene…. Here‘s what‘s happened so far (relevant to the breathing scene):

Max, played by Jamie Fox, a cab driver in Los Angeles has picked up Vincent, an assassin played by Tom Cruise. Vincent has hired Max for the whole night, telling him he has several stops to make. At Vincent‘s first kill stop, his target accidentally fell out of the open window after being shot and onto Max‘s cab. Max was tucking into a homemade sandwich when the body hit the roof and windshield and Max‘s food splattered all over the passenger seat and floor. (This is significant because the movie starts with Max meticulously cleaning his car.) Vincent returns, threatens Max with a gun and orders him to help him stuff the dead body into the trunk. Vincent then orders Max to drive on.

In his book Adventures in Human Being, physician and author Gavin Francis portrays different structures of the body and among them are the lungs,  which he calls “the breath of life”.

“…Lungs are the least dense organs in the body, because they are composed almost entirely of air. The word „lung“ comes from a Germanic root lungen, which itself arises from another Indo-European word meaning „light“. Read More

“Her death is like a short breath-stop” is a line from Serbian poet Vasko Popa’s elegy/eulogy to his English translator Anne Pennington. In his poem he achieves a wonderful reversal of meaning by juxtaposing “last breath” with “enlarges” – something narrowing with something widening – and “a short breath-stop” with “lime trees” – something abruptly ending with something yielding and lasting (etymologically “Lime” comes from Old English and Germanic languages lind, linde “lenient, yielding”). The emphasis of the ceasing of Anne Pennington’s breath at the beginning and the end of the poem paradoxically ensures her enduring presence in his life and the lives of all that knew her.