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2023 Respiradora(S). Gresite. Madrid

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RespiradoraS, 2023. Metal pipes, air compressor and plastic pipes. Gresite, Spain

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Being alive, from a purely physiological perspective, means breathing. Thanks to air we can float on water, we can swim.

RespiradoraS focuses on exhalation from a position of vindication of bodily processes and methodologies as an alternative to a patriarchal model that has proved to be a failure. 

 

As Luce Irigaray explains in her book The Forgetting of Air, the human being is made of matter and breath. According to her, air has been neglected in Western philosophy because "air does not manifest itself. As such, it resists appearing as (a) being. It allows itself to be forgotten. So it is the ubiquitous presence of air that makes it an absence and allows us to forget it so easily. Irigaray proposes a philosophy of breathing, that is, a philosophy that takes air into account. The philosophy of breathing addresses the questions of Being, using air as the starting point. We are surrounded and penetrated by air, so no thought and no artistic creation is possible without it.

 

This correlation between mobility and an impalpable element gives rise to sound; as defined by Aristotle in book I of Of the Soul, sound will be a leap of the soul out of itself. 

RespiradoraS is a sound installation that is experienced by immersing ourselves in water. The air manifests itself through the exhalation of two recovered water pipes that, thanks to a compressor that simultaneously loads and unloads air in a programmed way, the iron breathes through multiple orifices that have been made on its surface. 

 

This immateriality, which suddenly appears as a body, defies the normative and opens up spaces for connections and deviations. RespiradoraS reveals itself as an intimate and emotive exploration, challenging structures and enriching our understanding of the world.

 

Through this installation, breathing is reclaimed as an emotional, latent, relational, bellows state, which incorporates another kind of relationship with our ecosystem linked to femininity and energy, creating transitory encounters.

 

Thus, under a conception of the subject that includes the human, the animals, the plants, the environment and the planet, where there are no pre-constituted subjects but relations of pre-individual subjectivation, RespiradoraS approaches breathing as an expression associated with resilience, tolerance, patience, longing, in short; breathing as a generator of new imaginaries of a more sustainable future, exaltation as a self-regulating, listening, speaking valve that mediates and makes existence viable.

 

Núria Fuster

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