This Building, This Breath continues Kihlberg & Henry’s exploration of the disembodied voice in moving image and performance. For this piece, a voiceover is delivered live alongside a 15 minute video, activated whenever somebody enters the room. Here the duo explores cultural understandings of breathing as a device to play with the relationships between language, image, architecture and audience.
In the script, Kihlberg & Henry make use of a varied series of references of breathing, from biological meanings and principles in martial arts and yoga to deviations of the term such as those used in breathing materials and lens breathing. The voiced content coincides with the choreography of projected images as if images were falling from the speakers’ mouth, and retracting with his inhalations, combining eclectic and associative found footage. Adopting mechanisms familiar to the spheres of hypnosis or meditation in the structure and delivery of the script, this Building, This Breath drives towards an abstract proposition that the room itself is breathing.
This Building, This Breath was commissioned by fig-2, supported by the Art Fund, Outset, and Arts Council England.