Breathless Choir

Gosia Lehmann CLB Berlin Oct – Nov 2023

Video installation

Produced based on the workshop »Breathing In, Breathing Out: Practices of Air«

Futures of Air

Photos: © Michelle Mantel, Gosia Lehmann

The idea that singing could become a forgotten art due to the advancing climate crisis seems highly unsettling. Yet, as a condition of possibility for both survival on Earth and the transmission of sound, air becomes an almost sacred resource for the Breathless Choir.

Gosia Lehmann’s video installation portrays a group of people in search of their collective voice. Despite their shortage of breath, people are still trying to engage in music and singing together to echo each other and the sensation of breathing clean air. However, singing doesn’t come as easily as it used to, so it requires different techniques. In a shared ritual, the singers share their fading memories of breathing clean air. They ultimately succeed in getting in sync. Their song lasts only a few moments before they pass out.

Breathless Choir makes reference to the historical motif of the miners’ canary. The birds were widely used by miners as bioindicators to detect carbon monoxide. A canary that stopped singing and passed out in the cage indicated that toxic gas levels were too high and that the tunnel should be evacuated. The birds were reanimated in special oxygen tanks. The work exposes the vulnerability of breathing beings – and points to the various thresholds between the material and symbolic, the individual and collective, and wakefulness and other states of consciousness.

Performers: Lara Alarcón, Jessica Aszodi, Nina Guo, Marshall Vincent
Sound composition: Gabriel Klebber
Camera: Yannick Spiess
Sound engineer: Fraser Bowers
Set assistant: Valerian Blos