Breathing Matter, 2024
installation, sound, text.
Breathing matter sprouts in a shaded place.
It pulsates with invisible life.
The unspeakable is trying to take the shape of bubbling yeast.
You can hear it cracking, popping, merging into short-lived colonies and organisms. Joined for a moment. Joined for one dark all-encompassing breath, which will soon burst and make room for another and another. In constant motion, under cover, in its formless potential of forms – the matter is breathing. It draws its strength from the sub-living, from what lies in the shadows, to which the gaze must be accustomed.
After a bright flash, nothing can be seen.
The breathing matter oozes out and arranges itself to form a landscape whose elements are mobile, impermanent. They can be rolled up and regrouped at any time. Hills can move, undulations can disappear only to emerge elsewhere. Nothing is permanent here. The shapes, barely lit, are just dark spots. Shadows following a flash.
With a little light, contours begin to emerge.
Are they what we see? What we know? What we think they are? Or is it quite the opposite?
Read and written by Magdalena Franczak
"Usually when you are looking at an environmental catastrophe, you know it. Disasters have the look and feel of the natural order disassembled. In my mind, disasters should smell, smoke, or produce ugly scars. Yet nothing was out of place along this inviting little stream. The air was fresh. Swallows darted back and forth over the current. The afternoon was turning hot and, as if a siren were calling me, I had a desire to slip down and run my feet over the smooth stones on the river bottom. There were no fences or warning signs to stop me. I had to remind myself that I stood before the world’s most radiated river. I had never encountered a disaster more lovely and tempting, one less worthy of its name."
(K. Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters)
