Las Respiradoras was developed for The Voices of the GPS, an experimental exhibition where architects and choreographers collaborated to produce active installations around cars.
In traffic jams the air inside the car gets saturated. We expire loudly, impatiently. We sight, helpless. And when we open the car windows, the warm air that comes in smells bitter and itches our throat, as a consequence of the CO2 emitted by the exhaustion pipes. The traffic jam is then a space where breathing, usually an automatic bodily function, comes to the fore. We hear our breath, we communicate through it, and it is what mediates between our bodies and the exterior. And where we often have to decide if we breath our own breath, or the residues of our automated society. What is the potential of breathing together?
We proposed practices to breathe together, mediated by an installation that gets activated through social choreography. Breathing is normally considered an individual practice that we take for granted, as philosopher Luce Irigaray suggested. And yet, traffic jams make it visible. We take the chance to re-think breath and re-think ourselves at the same time. From a feminist perspective we claim that only collectively we can face the social, political and environmental issues of our times. But for that, it is necessary to find new forms of thinking and making the collective. We propose to breathe together as an exercise to work collectively, and as a means to be aware of the airs that we breathe.
