In this lecture, Maikon K will insert an artifact in the bodies of the listeners. A delicate bomb which will spread inside the arteries for an indefinite period of time. A surgery mediated by a screen. Digital Pranayama. Bardo de los muertos. In breathing, contours and certainties are lost. Can we really dissolve? What possibilities does the air give us? Breathing to ignite the fire, to bring down the house, to reanimate the body, to revolve the rubble, to remove the dust from the eyes.

Some questions on the ‘international’ art education: on studying, breathing and reciprocity

I would like to share some of my thoughts about difficulties with ‘international’ studies in arts, especially in dance and performance. Growing political and social crises in life always radicalize inequalities and the ways in which somebody is (and can become) an international student. (...) Growing political and social crises in life always radicalize inequalities and the ways in which somebody is (and can become) an international student.

The last words of Eric Garner or, recently, of George Floyd, “I can’t breathe!”, occupational lung diseases such as silicosis, respiratory distress due to socially induced anxieties: all these phenomena show how strongly breathing is affected and targeted by socio-political power. At the same time, breathing is an almost absent topic in western theory and philosophy. (...) In order to address the (biopolitical) vulnerability but also the vitality and relationality connected with breathing, we therefore need to revise this image of the body. What does it mean to conceive the body from breathing? (How) can we think breath?

Hope Ginsburg will speak about her recent and upcoming projects at the intersection of meditation, environment and interspecies well-being. Each of her recent works makes a climate-related proposal – from practicing present moment awareness with equanimity as a strategy for coping with climate change in Land Dive Team videos, workshops and performances (2014–present); to the analogy of amphibiousness for cultivating multispecies awareness in Land Dive Team: Amphibious James (2018); and a laboring with communities of hard corals for our shared survival in the collaborative, multichannel video Swirling (2019).

Even if breathing often happens automatically and unnoticed, it can only happen in intra-action with the world, through intimate relation(s) with other living organisms. In the current phase of their artistic research Breathing With, Miriam Jakob and Jana Unmüßig look at these entanglements as conditions for and emergence of intimacy and tackle the concern of intimacy through the explorations of somatic bodywork that focuses on breathing (Middendorf, Rosen).

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As one currently sees global protests for black lives sparking the streets, in the midst of a pandemic, a systematic revision of understandings of policing and security, which not only fail to account for but rather render impossible black lives, seems to be long-overdue. This talk discusses various modalities of policing black lives and abolitionist horizons.