ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores experiential methods of managing trauma through considering Luce Irigaray’s and Leonard Skof’s notion that we are living in the “Age of Breath” (2013). In presenting a recently made video: Breath Wind into Me, Chapter the author is asking whether it is possible to be sensitive to the needs of the other through our breathing. Does a deepening awareness of one’s breath create the circumstances where we can attend, not only to our bodies but to the bodies of others, to animals, nature, other cultures, oppressed minorities, and so on. Donna Haraway, in Staying with the Trouble, Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), suggests that in the midst of spiralling ecological disaster and the ensuing suffering, we need to find new ways to reconfigure our relationship to the earth and each other. Through strong figures, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation – she formulates ways to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth, where “[b]ecoming-with, not becoming is the name of the game” (12). Starting with Merleau-Ponty’s concept of an “immense exterior lung,” Haraway’s intention is to find an alternative approach to rethink the past and confront uncomfortable truths. The chapter summarises a project that builds upon seven years of art practice research into trauma and memory, and the challenge trauma poses for individuals, societies, and cultures. Through video, text, and sound, the author is investigating the interaction between states of knowing and not knowing, acknowledging and the refusal to acknowledge. She is also endeavouring to illuminate the relationships between previously unrelated events, structures, perceptions, and actions to explore cultural trauma, social responsibility, and political action.
