Shared Air: Embodied Fragments

In brief:

Resonant Ecologies in Fragments, Breath, and Shared Air

Sonic Bodies is an emerging constellation of sound works and embodied methodologies shaped by breath, listening, transnational feminist practice, maternal relation, migration, and transgenerational memory.

Like Filmic Bodies, these works do not stand alone as fixed objects. They form an interconnected ecology of atmospheres, resonances, delays, and traces. They listen for what exceeds language: breath, silence, echo, vibration, distance, and the affective residues of inherited histories.

At the heart of this practice is sonic breath: a methodology where breath guides rhythm, pacing, listening, and relation. If filmic breath asks how an image might breathe, sonic breath asks how memory might be carried through sound — across bodies, rooms, waters, borders, and time.

Influenced by Luce Irigaray’s concept of shared air, this approach listens for what lingers in the intervals: the pauses between words, the tremor of voice, the echo of a room, the breath before speaking, the vibration that remains after sound disappears.

These works ask:

How do we listen together across unequal and inherited conditions?
How can breath be heard across distance and delay?
What does sound carry that image cannot?
How might listening become a form of relation, care, and co-witnessing?

Shared Air: Sonic Fragments, Maternal Echoes

Radio Elsewheres [re.03]
Art Windsor-Essex, Windsor, Ontario, Canada | 16 October – 5 November 2025

Shared Air: Sonic Fragments, Maternal Echoes is the first sound work in this constellation.

The piece began with a simple question: what does it mean to listen to one of my embodied workshops not in the room, but later, elsewhere, through the body rather than the eyes?

This work marks an experimental shift in my practice: from filmic breath into sonic breath. It is not documentation of a workshop, but a transmission. A fragment rerouted. A delayed resonance. A way of allowing breath, voice, silence, and memory to travel beyond the space in which they first emerged.

Composed through the sonic logic of breath, the work moves through echo, pause, vibration, repetition, and suspended time. It holds fragments of embodied practice, maternal memory, Irish diasporic inheritance, and shared air, asking how sound might world bodies that are not physically present.

First Airing: Art Windsor-Essex

The work first aired as part of Radio Elsewheres [re.03], Oct 16 – Nov 5, 2025, at Art Windsor-Essex, Windsor, ON radioelsewheres.net.

This context was central to the work. Windsor sits across the Detroit River from Detroit, making the work’s first public transmission inseparable from questions of border, water, crossing, and threshold.

The piece emerged from Irish diasporic histories, yet it travelled into another border space: one marked by the Detroit River, by proximity and separation, by movement and containment. In this setting, the work spoke across geographies to the entangled experience of borders — not only territorial, but bodily, psychic, maternal, and relational.

Water became a threshold and archive. The Detroit River entered into relation with the Irish Sea: one separating Windsor and Detroit, the other marking colonial and migratory passages between Ireland and England.

The work lingers in these thresholds.

Sonic Breath

While my practice is rooted in film, Shared Air: Sonic Fragments, Maternal Echoes works with sound alone.

Sonic breath is attentive to what cannot always be seen. It listens to breath as atmosphere, as pressure, as memory, as relation. It allows the body to sense what arrives through echo and vibration rather than image.

The sound work asks how breath might offer a different kind of intimacy — not through visibility, but through resonance. Listening becomes a way of being with what is absent, delayed, or carried across distance.

This is important to my wider practice. My embodied workshops are shaped by breath, silence, and relational presence. Participants engage with difficult histories through text, performance, film fragments, and collective listening. In the sound work, those methods are translated into another register: one where the listener receives traces of the workshop through the body.

The work asks:

Can a breath still be shared when the bodies are no longer together?
Can sound carry relation across time?
Can listening become a form of delayed care?

Breath, Border, Water

The first airing in Windsor allowed the work to encounter water differently.

The Detroit River became more than a geographical marker. It became a listening body: a site of separation and relation, movement and border, nearness and distance.

In my practice, water often carries diasporic memory. The Irish Sea marks repeated crossings between Ireland and England, family histories of migration, and the afterlives of religious and state control over maternal bodies. The Detroit River brought those questions into another geography, where sound could move across a border the body might not cross.

Edited from an unsettled body, the piece searches for echoes of those who came before: traces carried within, carried across, and carried in the air we share.

Listening as Co-Witnessing

This work is grounded in transnational feminist practice.

Listening becomes a method of co-witnessing. Breath carries what exceeds language. Sonic presence holds space for ambiguity, memory, and inherited trauma without demanding explanation.

Shared air is not treated as innocent or universal. Breath is not equally granted, protected, or received. The work remains attentive to the politics of breath — to who is allowed to breathe freely, who is heard, who is silenced, and whose histories are carried without recognition.

In this context, sonic breath becomes a way of staying with what lingers. It does not resolve or repair in a simple sense. Instead, it creates a fragile listening space where memory can remain partial, resonant, and shared.

Part of a Wider Constellation

Shared Air: Sonic Fragments, Maternal Echoes sits within a wider constellation of filmic and embodied works, including Poetics of Filmic Breath, Hydro Feminine, Salt Breath — Not Yet the Sea, and Bodies of Water.

Where the filmic works explore breath through image, cut, gesture, and projection, the sonic works explore breath through echo, vibration, rhythm, and transmission.

Together, these filmic and sonic bodies form a living archive of shared air: a practice of listening across distance, inheritance, and relation.

Closing Line

Sonic breath carries what cannot be fully seen: echo, threshold, inheritance, and the air we continue to share.