Drawing Breath

Drawing Breath acts as an experiment, a proposal addressed to both its audience and contributors. This project stages an encounter between spoken and visual language through a set of simultaneous performances, first allowing the audience to witness a spontaneous interaction between media, then showcasing the products of these interactions.

On the 15th of April 2016 a set of artists were asked to perform a simultaneous visual response to poets’ performances. Each artist was paired with a poet and each performance was to last for five minutes.

The crux of the challenge for the artist was to work with material that they were discovering at the same time as their audience. Meanwhile, the poets were to select their work or works with a view to best suiting their experimental encounter. While the poets’ part involved performing pre-existent pieces, the artists’ complete lack of familiarity with the poets’ material pushed them to make instinctive choices and produce raw, immediate reactions.

Both the recordings of the poems and the visual works to which they gave rise were then showcased in an exhibition.
In the context of this project the labels of ‘artist’ and ‘poet’ serve as shortcuts to assign a medium to each set of participants without resorting to heavier expressions which could perhaps be more accurate such as ‘vocal performer’ and ‘visual practitioner’. Let us also note that a number of the participants are involved in both media throughout their practice.

The two categories of performers were chosen to form eclectic sets encompassing a variety of styles and backgrounds. Indeed, the performance event and subsequent exhibition were not designed to cater to a specific audience or to feature a particular style; the emphasis was on range in an effort to produce diverse encounters.
The pieces showcased in the exhibition act as artifacts. While they are definitely works in their own right, Drawing Breath, as a project, cannot be fully contained in these recordings, drawings, paintings and assemblages. As a series of fixed objects of sound and image they cannot account for the concept’s core principles of immediacy and simultaneity.

Moreover, this project does not claim to resolve any question concerning the relationship between sound-based and visual language; rather it is a simple gesture towards opening a complex and multifaceted discussion.

The Team
Curation: Iris Colomb
Host: Zorro Maplestone
Visual identity and tech: Nik Nightingale
Filming: Eta Dahlia with Tyrone Lewis, Tom Stone
Photography: Karoliina Helosuo
Sound: Andrey Novikov
Editing: Tyrone Lewis with Eta Dahlia and Iris Colomb

Special thanks to Ziferblat for providing the space and support needed to realize this project.

• http://drawingbreath.net/post/1439895687...
• http://london.ziferblat.net/event/drawin...