IV Poetics of Textual and Bodily Breath
Barcelona Listening and Reading Group
Rooted in Breath, Story, and Transgenerational Memory
This listening and reading group took place informally in Barcelona in spring 2025 and emerged through ongoing conversations and collaborations across distance, with artist and musician Angelos Streklas (based in Barcelona, originally from Greece) and Melina Flaviana Di Fabrizio, an Argentine transdisciplinary art therapist and textile artist also based in Barcelona. Our exchange began at Tsarino Residency in Bulgaria and continued through online dialogues and sonic improvisations, eventually taking root in shared space, sound, and breath with a community Angelos is part of in Barcelona.
The session continued and re-sounded themes from previous gatherings, reading from A Pagan Place and My Mother Laughs, while also opening up to new textures, sounds, and forms. Angelos introduced the Greek bouzouki and, through our conversations, began learning "The Foggy Dew" (The Chieftains, 1995), bridging Greek and Irish musical traditions as a form of diasporic, embodied response to the texts and practices we were exploring. This sonic gesture became an improvisational score: echoing breath, memory, and longing across geographies.
Melina brought her practice into dialogue with ours, grounded in therapeutic photography, feminist anthropology, and embroidered storytelling. Together, we considered:
How maternal memory is inscribed onto the body, textile, and land, exploring breath and materiality as vessels for intergenerational transmission.
Photo-embroidery and text as archives of care, absence, and inheritance, connecting feminist oral traditions to tactile and visual storytelling.
The silences within the maternal; how listening, breath, and shared reading can open collective space for working through inherited and embodied narratives.
These listening and reading sessions created a transnational constellation across Greece, Argentina, Ireland, and Catalonia, held in a shared field of breath and sound. The roots of this practice now deepen into upcoming embodied workshops and listening and reading groups with Angelos and Melina across Ireland and beyond.
These forthcoming sessions will expand on:
Breath as a transformative force within transgenerational memory, where maternal breath carries histories of silence, resistance, and resilience.
Musical scripts composed by Angelos on Greek and Irish bouzouki, responding to site, story, and sonic improvisation.
Filmic breath and visual interventions that reimagine maternal relation as a site of transformation rather than rupture.
Together, we inhabit a doubleness of dreaming, body and psyche stretched between geographies; breathing through diasporic inheritances, carrying shared air into new places, new gatherings, and new traces.
