Mind the Step, Dublin | March 2025

Listening & Reading Group – Dublin

Our Dublin session brought together voices in a shared exploration of breath, memory, and maternal relations. Moving through three fragments of text—Chantal Akerman’s My Mother Laughs (the shopping list as both burden and anchor), Edna O’Brien’s Desert Island Discs interview (where she reflects on her mother), and participant contributions—we traced how stories, silence, and inherited emotions reside within the body.

I presented these as maternal scenes—moments where we can attend to our individual breath, collective breath and how the texts breathe.

We introduced ourselves through bodies of water, reflecting on how water holds memory, migration, and breath across generations. Through collective reading, we attuned to the rhythm of the texts and our own bodies, listening to how language and breath interweave. The session invited an open, processual engagement with text—where reading became embodied, words moved through us, and breath carried meaning beyond the page.

This Dublin gathering was the first of its kind, deepening the transnational dimension of these Listening & Reading Groups and opening space for new resonances between text, voice, and shared air.

A note on the photos: In keeping with feminist and queer ethical practices, only those who consented to photography are shown in the images, ensuring that participation remained a space of care and agency.