Breath Symposium | Jacob Caines, David Sebastián Lopez Restrepo, Geneviève Wallen, and maya rae oppenheimer
June 1, 2022
illustration: Lilly Lam
On March 10, 2022, maya rae oppenheimer invited three friends and colleagues to talk about breath. The plan was to have an informal roundtable on breath as a complex physical, cultural, and political action. The result was a generous conversation with David Sebastián Lopez Restrepo talking about breath-awareness in his performance art and actions, Jacob Caines reflecting on the unifying training of breathing together for musicians and conductors, and Geneviève Wallen marking space for breath as communication and thinking-through in curatorial practice.
maya rae oppenheimer | photo: Paul Ward
maya rae oppenheimer
I'm very happy to be hosting you in this conversation with the purpose not to define breath but rather to complicate it. The three of you were invited because of links in your work to breath as matter, as discipline, or in some cases as preoccupation or curiosity—be it embodied, rhythmic, and so on.
Let’s start with introductions and our furthest geography before bringing it back to where I'm recording, in Montréal/Tiohtià:ke, which is Kanien’kehá:ka land. We are starting with David Sebastian Lopez Restrepo, in Copenhagen. David, I met you in 2019 as a participating artist in VIVA! Art Action, the performance art biennale in Montréal, and I recall you had to Zoom in because of visa complications. In addition to your performance art, musicianship and work as a curator, facilitator, and community organizer, is there anything else we should know?
David Sebastián Lopez Restrepo, video still from Lullaby for a Foreign Soldier, 2021 | image: courtesy of the artist
David Sebastián Lopez Restrepo
I am very transdisciplinary and like to explore different sides of art. I have never liked to be framed as just a musician or performance artist. I like to be a little bit more free and do what I like.
The experience I had in Montréal, it was very special, because it allowed me to think about the importance of social media and communication platforms for people like me, for immigrants who come from places with difficulties like visas. My visa was rejected by Canadian authorities because they thought that I would not leave the country after my collaboration with VIVA!, which is strange because I live in Copenhagen, basically the Canada of Europe. My participation in VIVA! was related to my practice as a performance artist, and I would say chef. I was exploring identities, nationalities, and many other things through food. It was pre-Covid, but I had the same experience the following year. So it was preparation for this whole season of absurdity.
maya
You bring in an important point about the conversation we're having now, the circumstances in which we're having it—Covid—and the association of breath and health, accessibility, and racial and social justice that come along with it.
Now, let’s move from Copenhagen to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Jacob Caines. I met you in connection to your teaching assistant work in Interdisciplinary Studies in Fine Arts at Concordia University. And you're also a PhD student here. But you are teaching at Dalhousie, in Halifax, and you're a conductor. You engage folks in relation to breath in studio, on stage, but sometimes via Zoom—is that an interesting barrier or invitation for you?
Jacob Caines
I’ll use barrier, yep. It's a beautiful day here in Halifax. And since we're calling things as they are, I’m in Kjipuktuk, in Mi’kma’ki.
Jacob Caines | photo: Classical Queer
maya
Is there anything else you'd like to let us know?
Jacob
I work a lot in the conducting world and music world. For the majority of my artistic life, I've centred around being a music-first artist, although I've always had a multidisciplinary bent. Everything I do is site-based, and everything I conceive is collaborative. I’ve spent most of my work as a musician really not talking about music at all but about collaboration and connection with other methods of creation.
In the past three years, which was not pandemic-planned, I've also switched gears a fair amount. My PhD work is not disconnected from performance in music, but it's more focused on human geography, on queer theory and connecting queer musicians and performance art to city infrastructures and to how cities work.
maya
There’s a kindred interest in movement around cities between you and David, and we also have someone else who moves around cities, Geneviève Wallen. Geneviève, you are joining us from the Concordia campus.
Geneviève
Welcome to my beautiful mint office!
maya
You can tell that's an institutional space! I had the pleasure of meeting you as Exhibition Coordinator at the FoFA Gallery. But that is one of many things you do. You have a curious curatorial practice outside of that. You have projects that are curatorial in an expanded sense, working across mail, playlists, letters. You also write about art, and I've heard you say that “making connections” is a hobby.
Geneviève Wallen | photo: Laurence Philomene
Geneviève
Today, I'm painting at the gallery, and I'm actually painting mostly in silence today. At first I told my colleague, “Put on your podcasts, anything you were listening to before I entered this space with you.” But then he didn't, and I was like, “You know what, I think I actually need some quiet time.” It's been nice.
maya
That’s awareness of your own breath! I often lose track of listening to my breath when I'm listening to podcasts, consuming media.
Geneviève
Yeah, we're always outside of our bodies. I think it's something even more so right now. I'm interested in listening to the other guests—I feel like your practices are embodied, and maybe you're more within your bodies?
maya
Our next round will bring your perspectives into conversation with “breath” and one another, yes. David, please take it away.
David Sebastiàn Lopez Restrepo, performance visual | image: Instagram @davidlopezrestrepo
David
First, I would like to share this image with you. It looks like a drawing of the circulatory system, like blood vessels. In some way, it is blood vessels because it's how I've been circulating through the city of Copenhagen. This is basically the map of Copenhagen through a cycling journey I started on the 11th of November 2021. My goal is to do 9,400 kilometres by bike, delivering food using an app called Wolt, mostly used by customers, by Danish people. Workers are mostly immigrants. Myself, I'm an immigrant. I work with this part of my identity and how being an immigrant in this city has shaped my perspective of the city and my practice of art. I decided to take, once again, work that is only done by immigrants in order to start knitting a discourse.
How can I think about the involvement of breath? It's connected with my past works. It's always about the repetition of an action that at some point can be perceived as meaningless or something you take for granted.
maya
Is there a significance behind the goal of 9,400 kilometres?
David
It’s the distance between Columbia and Denmark. This project has a few layers that I started with. But during every ride, I put more and more layers. At the beginning were two things: the political issue about how migrants are the ones taking low-income jobs in order to survive in big cities and how we are forced to do these kinds of jobs. Here in the city of Copenhagen, you can find a lot of students, immigrant students from the Royal Art Academy or the Rhythmic Music Academy, all of them working delivering food or doing food. It's an industry that is moved by migrants, an immigrant workforce. The second layer is a metaphorical trip from the city where I am to the place I come from. Also, for political reasons, I can't go back to Colombia. There's nostalgia invoked by my project. It’s a metaphorical journey.
maya
I appreciate your description of how it started with a particular intent, and as you're going through the process of the project, it's developing layers. And, on that note, we will invite Jacob to share more about their work.
Jacob
I'm a clarinettist by training, so a wind instrument that does not make sound without breath. But my practice is also largely in wind ensembles. I conduct here at Dalhousie, a wind ensemble, and have for many years been conducting ensembles and choirs. One of my first lessons as a conductor was that you are not making sound. You are in the weird position of being a musician who's not actually making any music, but you're guiding and directing and need to breathe. If you watch a conductor who's not breathing with the ensemble, who's not connected with the ensemble, you feel dead and disconnected and detached.
It becomes more and more present to me, the idea of breath as a connector. There's no way to get 80 people to move at the same time without breath. We have this phrase: "If you breathe together, you play together,” and it's very true of any ensemble. It doesn't mean it's purely for choirs or wind ensembles, but also string players and pianists and percussionists and people who don't necessarily use breath or air to make their sound creation. We have this affectionate term, “the chamber music sniff,” where you go [gestures a deep inhale and mimes beginning to play a violin] and play. For me, what it has become is almost a meditative practice in how I make art and make music. To me, breathing together tells my brain that I'm now in performance mode, now working together, and it's not a solo endeavour.
You said the word “barrier” at the beginning. This interaction on Zoom has taken that breath, taken the wind, literally out of our lungs. It's difficult to have that kind of embodied reaction, that sound reaction, that feeling, that understanding of breathing together when you're on Zoom.
maya
There should be a revising of the common phrase “reading the room” to “breathing the room,” because of how you've just articulated that sensitivity to being together as a synchronicity. As groups return to stage, I'm seeing images of orchestras and choirs and ensembles with plexiglass dividers, and I can see how that would separate vapour but also sound.
Jacob
Our concert halls are designed so that people sit specific distances around the space, and the floor vibrates, the walls vibrate, and the air between musicians vibrates. That's how they're designed and built. From an acoustician standpoint, as soon as we start placing plexiglass between people and as soon as we start moving distances further apart—it's necessary right now, of course—it changes how halls reverberate and sound and how people can hear.
maya
That's a really intriguing point. Geneviève, if I can make a bridge here, about making space for breath and the similarities between conducting, as Jacob's described it, and Geneviève, the way you approach curation. You're working with people and facilitating a space where you've got a role that is often associated with power or gatekeeping. But if you have that different approach of making space for practitioners to breathe, it's quite different.
Geneviève
I like Jacob’s expression. Is it, “When you breathe together, you play together?”
Jacob
Yeah, breathe together, play together.
Geneviève
It's so true in terms of how we come in contact with each other when sharing the same space, and it's applicable to so many spaces. I want to think more about this: How can I apply this concept in regards to curatorial practice, since it's so relational?
I was musing about the places in my practice where breath is something that is like a “bringing forth” of something conscious. I realized that I like to start sometimes, if I am a facilitator for a workshop or talk, with a few breaths because I believe that usually when you are entering that communal space, a lot of the time you're coming from somewhere else and you're bringing your whole day with you or whatever energy you picked up while travelling.
Also, I am an anxious person. I don't think a lot of people get that from me, I actually am. So I also kind of need it as well. In order to play together, to be in conversation with each other and be in our bodies, I like to take deep breaths with others. It also links to my practice of care. For me, care and breathing are interlinked. I make this connection also because of my mother who is a spiritual coach and does meditation.
I have also used breath as rhythm in writing. I was invited by the artist Ahreum Lee to contribute to a publication that was about her work and also different declinations of thinking through care. I was thinking about that text last week, and it coincided with maya's invitation. Throughout the text, I have affirmations and breathing exercises. I was contemplation on the pandemic when I wrote it—we were marking the first anniversary—and the title is: "When I get anxious, the first thing I forget is to breathe.” And I think most people forget.
I also am very interested in thinking about breath as agency. And how there's a lot of space for sovereignty in breath. Making choices. There's activism in breath.
maya
I just circled many, many times in my notes the idea of sovereignty and breath. I feel like that could be a beautiful exhibition in terms of your curatorial concepts and making space for what that could bring into cultural work. Let's continue to discuss and make connections. Were there certain things that you wanted to ask one another?
Geneviève
I actually have a question for you, David. I was thinking, what if we put together the words "migrant" and "breath" and then "migrant breath" as a concept for the work you're doing?
David
Wow, this is very interesting. I have a work that I did a couple of years ago, more or less at the beginning of the pandemic. The Prime Minister of Denmark said something very controversial. I would say very racist. She said that the coronavirus was spreading more among the immigrant communities, and she was basically referring to Middle Eastern communities. I'm also part of this community of immigrants. And, as Jacob said, breathing is important and now it's a sickness transmitted by our breath. So, I did this this face mask with the word "foreigner,” and I was wandering around, going everywhere I wanted to go. I was a foreigner clearly without the word "foreigner." But just pointing that out, for me, makes a point that is important to clarify, that it's not only the air of the foreigners that spread the virus.
I would also like to add to what Jacob says when he's conducting. It reminds me of 4’33” [John Cage], for instance, because breathing sounds are important in that work. In any ensemble, if you remove the sounds of every instrument, you will have the powerful and rhythmic sound of breathing. I did this piece with an Italian musician a couple of years ago, where I was riding his bike, and he connected microphones to the bike, but also to my body and close to my mouth. He recorded and mixed live. After, when we heard the recording, it was interesting how my breathing was changing throughout the time. It was about one hour of cycling, pretty hardcore, but by the end my breathing was super present like my heart. Also circulation is taken for granted, and we’re aware only when it's out of the normal rhythm.
Jacob
It's funny, David, that you bring up 4’33” and the opposite of sound creation: if you remove all sound, then what you're left with is this aspiration in and out. And if you take all of the sound away from a live orchestral recording, you're left with breathing and sitting in chairs.
What's fascinating is we've had this trend over the past 30 years in the recording world, in music, of taking out all of those sounds. You take out the fret buzz. You take out the slide finger on a guitar. You take out the sound of a singer inhaling. You take out the sound of the orchestra moving. We have these manicured, weird, lifeless recordings completely detached from the people who are playing the actual pieces of music that now exist. It's not representative of what the piece’s intention was or live performance. But it's interesting to do the flip and put in only the sound of the aspiration, the sound of you biking and breathing and the natural rhythm . It's powerful to hear that inhale, to hear that heartbeat increase, to hear that breath move faster and faster with the physical exertion.
For those people who are maybe not familiar with 4’33”, it is a wonderfully amazing piece of music that is a score with no notes. It's in three movements. You open it up, and the intent is to listen to the audience sit for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, and you begin the piece, you open the score, then you have people coughing, wrestling, and sniffing. It's a very human piece. It's collaborative in the truest sense that everybody is there to perform the piece together, whether you know it or not. Whether you're aware that you're doing it, you're there to collaborate.
maya
Every time 4’33” is performed, it's different because of the energies in the room, a dynamic you reflected upon Geneviève, and it has that potential for repetition. It reminds me of a one-page play by Samuel Beckett called Breath. The reason I mention it is because it's short, invites repetition, circumstantial interpretation, and there's no script. It relies on stage-setting with spare instructions for props, lighting, and sound. And because of that, there's a lot of space for interpretation. When Breath is repeated, it becomes a multi-layered piece, and its central concept is the importance of breath as a life force. The idea of breath being an invitation for further thought or for paying attention is also part of the piece.
Geneviève
Also, breath as communication. Because there's different ways or there's the changing of rhythm, I would say, like when you do an activity, a physical activity, or when you're stressed, or also in the context of music. You are always communicating.
Jacob Caines, maya rae oppenheimer, David Sebastián Lopez Restrepo, and Genviève Wallen on Zoom, 2022
maya
I want to invite a winding down on the topic of empathy and how important breath is to sustain the body, but also to connect and to imagine the embodied experiences and positions of others. Perhaps one way this manifests is the topic of language. Around the table, we're speaking in English, but we have Spanish, French, music, and other languages perhaps we speak, and the languages of our disciplines. And these are infused with a cadence in our breath that is sometimes more laboured, sometimes easy. It’s on this note of empathy and language and connection that I can invite last reflections.
Jacob
David, you said that as a vocalist you think about breath. If you work in the world of opera song, which is in any number of languages, from Italian, German, English, French, Northern European—Western tonal music languages—they all have a different cadence, and you sing them differently. You breathe in different places. Part of it is because the creation of the sounds you're making are from a different place in your tongue, in your mouth, and your oesophagus and your lungs need to be in a different configuration to make those sounds. But it has a real-world effect on how you produce your art form.
As a native English speaker singing in a different language, you have to change your idea of breath. It has an artistic form, but it is also a way to put yourself into at least some small part of the brain of somebody else's existence. You're singing in somebody else's language. You have to adapt, you have to change, you have to modify to get some brief understanding of what somebody else was trying to write about it. And it's through breath, it's through language and breathing. But I think that applies outside of music as well.
David
In Faroese, they not only say words when they are exhaling, but also when they are inhaling. We, in Spanish, only say things while exhaling. But they say, all the time, “yes,” while inhaling. They're either saving time or they're eating the word.
Jacob
In Nova Scotia, we have a small group of East Coasters who were probably from the Faroe Islands. We have a lot of Celtic roots. For those people, who are settlers in Nova Scotia, we have "aspirated affirmation” [Jacob demonstrates].
David
Like that!
Geneviève
For me, the last thought on breath goes with what I'm thinking about conceptually as "breathing room" and giving space for the formulation of a thought, which is why as I am speaking, I took a breath to think. I was considering the notion of unfinished thoughts and giving space for that in visual art practice and curatorial practice. I think that in an art practice, there are some things that are mechanical and that we take for granted until they are disturbed. I was pondering about curatorial practice and how research always equals a thesis, and from that thesis, you are working with others to expand it, rework it, co-create a visual manifestation of it. But then I was thinking, what if you put together a show and your thesis is incomplete, and you know that the first show is the first step of exploring that idea? And maybe later you can have a second breath and revisit it.
I'm thinking about exploring themes that are more anchored in contemplation, themes that are open, branching out in every direction instead of presenting something concise. For me, it's also about agency and the way I'm reading my ideas, because with my positionality, I feel that I always have to create with assurance, and I always have to create with a goal. It seems like I am expected to answer to some urgency. Maybe in doing slow curation, as eunice bélidor says, it's about countering that and taking your time and being calm with your ideas instead of responding to the anxiety of producing something affirmative and sure.
David
Geneviève, I really like the things you’ve said about being aware of breathing and how meditation brought to you this approach of breathing as part of your practice. Getting calm. I guess this must be part of our works, being aware that breathing is one of the most important elements.
Jacob Caines is a conductor, musicologist, and performer based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Jacob is on faculty at Dalhousie University, where he is the director of the DAL Wind Ensemble and occasional professor of music history. Jacob has also been on faculty at The Maritime Conservatory of Performing Arts as the head of the woodwind and theory departments. He is the founder of ClassicalQueer, a project dedicated to interviews with Queer+ performers, writers, musicians, administrators and artists. As a performer, Jacob was the music director for the award-winning national tour of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. He is a founding member of the ALKALI Collective which performs and commissions works by living Canadian queer and BIPOC composers. In 2021, Jacob began his doctoral work with the INDI PhD program at Concordia University, where he is researching the role that Canadian communities of Queer+ classical musicians play in shaping the culture of cities.
Born in Medellín, Colombia, David Sebastián Lopez Restrepo received a Bachelor’s of Fine and Visual Arts at the Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia, where he experimented with installation, video art, and performance while working as a teacher at the preschool and pedagogic research center Rayuela. Sebastian then travelled to Argentina and completed a Master’s in Combined Artistic Languages at Universidad Nacional de las Artes. His artworks have been shown in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Spain, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Åland, Svalbard, Faroe Islands, and in cultural venues and galleries in Denmark, including The National Danish Art Gallery. His work is part of the Colombian Consulate’s Artists Abroad Bank. David lives in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he is the director of Performance Køkkenet and is organizing the yearly international performance art festival Body Landscapes.
Geneviève Wallen is a Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal and Tkaronto/Toronto-based independent curator, writer, and researcher. Wallen’s practice is informed by intersectional feminism, intergenerational dialogues, and BIPOC healing platforms offering alternatives to neo-liberal definitions of care. Her ongoing curatorial explorations include the practice of gift-giving, carving space for unfinished thoughts, and musings on the intersection of longevity and pleasure.
maya rae oppenheimer is a daughter, sister, aunt, and plant-mother of Icelandic and Canary Islander descent who receives financial remuneration as a writer/researcher/educator. She was born in Treaty 1 Territory and spent over a decade living in London, England. maya is now an uninvited guest on Kanien'kehá:ka territory where she preoccupies herself with writing as a social practice and the tangles of narratives that inform our worldviews. Experimental writing, performance, radical pedagogy, open-access publishing, DIY tactics, and rogue archival gestures make up her toolkit. maya joined the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in September 2017 as Assistant Professor in Art History. She now works across the Department of Studio Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies in Fine Arts and is the founder of OK Stamp Press.
Lilly Lam is an illustrator and graphic designer based in New York City. As a Taiwanese and Chinese-American, she looks for opportunities to explore her identity through illustration.
