Workshop: Shared Air, Situated Breath

Part of the Situated Knowledges LAB Series
Goldsmiths, University of London | Spring 2025

This workshop was developed and facilitated as part of the Situated Knowledges LAB series, a 20-week module supporting students in developing public-engaged, reflective art practices. Each LAB invites students to critically and creatively explore how knowledge is produced, embodied, and shared, particularly in relation to feminist, decolonial, and practice-based frameworks.

My session, Shared Air, Situated Breath, explored breath as both method and philosophy for attending to relational, embodied, and affective terrains. Grounded in transnational feminist theory and the Irish Catholic maternal, the workshop wove together storytelling, silence, somatic exercises, and fragments from my filmic practice to invite students into a collective practice of listening, sensing, and attuning to "shared air", a concept I extend from Luce Irigaray’s philosophy.

Students were invited to reflect on maternal inheritance, situated memory, and affective resistance, drawing connections between archival fragments, state control, and personal histories. We also explored the work of artists such as Jesse Jones and Sarah Browne, considering how artistic and curatorial interventions can reconfigure dominant narratives and open space for social change.

To extend the practice beyond the session, I offered a writing exercise, inviting students to reflect through a series of open-ended prompts on breath, affect, Irish situated knowledges, and the transformative potential of art in public space. These reflections encouraged deeper engagement with how we carry knowledge in and through the body, and how we might imagine otherwise.