Breath Library was launched in February 2021, in collaboration with Victoria Vesna and the team at the UCLA Art|Sci Center as a part of UCLA Art|Sci Center multi-year research project “Atmosphere of Sound. Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption”. It consists of the series of workshops and ever-growing library of breath recordings contributed by the participants of the workshops and all those who are willing to record a 30-sec up to 1 minute of their breathing and upload the file via simple Google Forms.

Amplified and conscious breathing can become a practice of inquiry into the intricate, elaborate and infinitely sophisticated network of interrelations spanning far beyond individual, autonomous human body. Through a simple act of breathing we may participate in the whole range of scales and time flows: for the terrestrial atmosphere, a given water molecule, the one we breathe in and breathe out as oxygen, might spend in the atmosphere 15,23 days on the average. Yet, a phrase “I can’t breathe” widely resonated over the last years, pinpointing a number of crises long in the making.  Achille Mbembe in his illuminating essay “The Universal Right to Breathe” aptly remarks: “Before this virus, humanity was already threatened with suffocation”. 

Attending to breath can also be a tool of insight into intricate patterns of social inequalities and discrimination, neoliberal fixation on economic efficiency at the cost of human and other lifeforms well-being, loss of life on a planetary scale, and climate catastrophe.

With Breath Library I would like to emphasize that breath exchange – donating one’s own breath and listening to breathing of others – can be a practice of intimacy on a global scale. We may bear different economic, political, ecological and social conditions, but we all breathe – inevitably co-breathing with the whole web of life on Earth, dependent on it and interwoven with organisms of different scales, states of matter, different positions in power structures.I’m wondering: what if the practice of conscious breathing was about donating each breath to all lifeforms suffocating from ecological devastation, social inequalities, economic deprivation, discrimination, emotional degradation, hopelessness and loneliness? What if we actually started listening to each and every breath as a unique mark of vibrant, powerful, and resilient lifeforce? 

I hope you want to co-create this Breath Library with us.