#breathingchoir – Purple Noise

#breathingchoir, performance by #purplenoise
Empowerment Exhibition, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Opening night, 10 September 2022

Six performers use a breathing score to connect to each other, to the visitors at the museum and the people active on their social media.
Magdalena Götz, Christina Grammatikopoulou, Marion Niewiadomski, Janine Sack, Cornelia Sollfrank, Sophie Wohlgemuth

As part of our project #shareyourair and in addition to our interactive space in the museum, #purplenoise did a live performance at the opening night. The performance gave expression to the performative nature of breathing and served to make visible different aspects of breathing and to connect within the choir as well as with the audience in the space and the contributors on social media.

During the research phase of our project (1.3.-1.6.2022), we held various workshops to delve deeper into the subject of breathing ourselves, to learn various techniques and also to familiarize ourselves with various philosophical and medical approaches to this subject. During one of these workshops with the artist and yoga teacher Sabine Siegfried from Hamburg, the topic of György Ligeti’s archive came up, in whose musical collection there are recordings of indigenous choirs consisting only of breathing sounds. This inspired us to experiment with it as part of our project.

Score

The basis for the choir is a score with different signs representing different breathing techniques, i.e. a breathing score. The various breathing patterns are composed with regard to the physiological and psychological effects of the breathing techniques as well as their tonal quality.

Communication

Through breathing, we are constantly communicating with our environment and other people. Each person breathes differently depending on how their emotions are at the moment. Breathing can create different states of consciousness, different emotions, depending on what we breathe (the particular air) and how we breathe (our individual lungs and breathing rhythm). Breathing is a symbiotic relationship. By breathing together in the choir, we breathe in the emotions of others, we influence our own emotions by following a score, and we synchronize them.

Awareness of the air

Breath is the element behind every voice, word, music, and even thought. When air leaves the body, it passes through the vocal cords and becomes vocal expression with the help of the mouth. Singers are known to shape the breath to achieve the right tone and duration. This is also true for people who give speeches (politicians, lecturers). But we tend to “forget the air,” as Luce Irigaray would say (when she explained that Western philosophers consumed air to create their philosophy but never mentioned it).

Temporality/Spatiality

By bringing air from other places, we bring the emotions that linger in that air, the moment it was inhaled and exhaled, the dust particles that affect our lungs. But the air we breathe in also contains “messages” from the participants in the museum (for example, if they are sharing on social media at the time).

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Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Empowerment publication