I am writing a book on aesthetic responses to a contemporary crisis in breathing. This social, political, and environmental crisis is typified by the increased pollution, weaponization, and monetization of air and breath, the consequences of which are unevenly distributed. Breath/Measure/Commons is an experiment that transposes the questions of exemplarity and generalizability I have been considering into the form of the meditation. Reading about other people’s breathing makes me aware of mine—but my breathing tells me very little about other people’s experiences. This is what I try to convey in a meditation that centers engagements with breathing within Black and Indigenous Studies: the limits of what breathing enables us to measure, or, put differently, how breathing registers the unevenness of the atmospheres we inhabit.

The track includes instructions for a creative exercise. Listen on your own or with others, indoor or outdoor. As long as there is an environment to be sensed.



Works Cited and Consulted

Crawley, Ashon. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. “About.” Black Feminist Breathing Chorus, 2014, https://blackfeministbreathing.tumblr.com/.

Parikka, Jussi. “The Sensed Smog: Smart Ubiquitous Cities and the Sensorial Body.” The Fibreculture Journal 29 (2017): http://twentynine.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-219-the-sensed-smog-smart-ubiquitous-cities-and-the-sensorial-body/.

Reagon, Bernice Johnson. “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century.” In Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith, 356–368. New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983.

Richmond, Scott. Cinema’s Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Simmons, Kristen. “Settler Atmospherics.” Cultural Anthropology, November 20, 2017, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/settler-atmospherics.

Taylor, Dorceta E. Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

Tremblay, Jean-Thomas. “Aesthetic Self-Medication: Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose’s Structures of Breathing.” Women & Performance 28, no. 3 (2018): 221–238.

Tremblay, Jean-Thomas. “Feminist Breathing.” differences 30, no. 3 (2019): 92–117.



Bio:

Jean-Thomas Tremblay is an assistant professor of English at New Mexico State University. Their scholarship in the environmental and medical humanities, literary and cultural studies, and feminist, queer, and trans studies, has been published in differences, Women and Performance, Criticism, Post45, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and Critical Inquiry. Their public writing has appeared in such venues as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Rambling, Full Stop, Arcade, Make Magazine, and Chicago Review.

Jean-Thomas' monograph in progress, Breathing Aesthetics, argues that breathing has emerged, since the 1970s, as a medium that configures embodiment and experience as effects of biopolitical and necropolitical forces. Within a crisis in the reproduction of life marked by the air's pollution, weaponization, and monetization, articulations of individual and collective survival and persistence must grapple with the management and dispersal of the risks of breath. Breathing Aesthetics surveys minoritarian contexts where the aestheticization of breathing generates medium-specific and historically, culturally, and environmentally situated tactics and strategies for living under precarity. Jean-Thomas is also editing, with Drew Strombeck, the collection Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s.

More information on past and upcoming projects is available at jttremblay.wordpress.com.

Heavy Breathing

HB/AV: Breath/Measure/Commons (Jean-Thomas Tremblay, 2020)

In this experiential audio workshop Clay (They/Them) and Rusti (She/They), friends and somatic bodyworkers, use their own bodies and experiences as a form of collaborative research, attempting to understand this thing called Dysphoria. This inquiry began when Clay was unable to find resources on this topic and invited Rusti to explore dysphoria somatically together, both from the perspective of being trans and experiencing dysphoria themselves and working with trans and gender variant clients in their respective practices.

Starting from embodied research, they asked themselves questions such as, "How would you describe or give language to what happens in your body/mind when you experience gender dysphoria?”, and “Is it always useful and strategic to be embodied when you’re experiencing dysphoria?”

In exploring the ways that dysphoria is both a social phenomenon and an individualized felt sense that differs for different bodies, a tool kit of body practices emerged to begin to unravel the boundaries and fault lines of gender dysphoria’s tangled relationship between self and other. Clay and Rusti found themselves in a messy cosmos outside of pathologization, where the body’s knowledge innately holds physicality, politics, autonomy and ancestors.

Workshop Instructions:

This is for trans and gender variant people who would like to dive deeper into understanding and working with their dysphoria. We hope the workshop can act as a stable frame to explore these topics, but we recognize this is very intense work, so please take care of yourself. You can always pause the workshop and come back, or stop it. Ideally it would be great to practice in small groups for discussion afterwards, but it can also be practiced alone. Find yourself in a quiet room, in comfortable clothes; there will be minimal movement, but during practices we will suggest you change position (sitting/standing/laying) occasionally.

Resources/Links:

Trans Healthcare Manifesto, Edinburgh Action for Trans Health
https://edinburghath.tumblr.com/post/163521055802/trans-health-manifesto

Dysphoria Means Total Destroy (2011) http://anarchalibrary.blogspot.com/2012/01/dysphoria-means-total-destroy-2011.html

Trans Liberation and Feminism Self-determination, healthcare and revolutionary struggle by Michelle O’Brien (2003) http://anarchalibrary.blogspot.com/2010/09/trans-liberation-and-feminism-self.html

Towards an Autonomous Trans Healthcare Zine by Power Makes Us Sick (2018)
https://pms.hotglue.me/?resources

The Politics of Trauma by Staci Haines 
 https://thepoliticsoftrauma.com    

Queer Phenomenology by Sara Ahmed 
https://www.dukeupress.edu/queer-phenomenology     

Trans Bodies and the Failure of Mirrors by S.J. Langer 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311219105_Trans_Bodies_and_the_Failure_of_Mirrors_Symonds_Prize_co-winner

About the Artists:

Clay's art and writing can be found on instagram at @pastacomplex and their somatic work @sentientsomatics

Rusti: ThirdspaceSomatics.com / Instagram @thirdspace.somatics

Kai Merke (sound editor): jo.hotglue.me

For full bios, please visit heavyheavybreathing.com/artists

HB/AV: Dysphoric Feelings/Euphoric Bodies (Clay AD and Rusti, 2020)

"every particle of sand carries a piece of the mountain away" is a three-part essay on erosion as a tour of the coastline of Vandenberg Air Force Base: a large, restricted base on the central coast of California. Along the way, the landscape will encourage participation in movement and writing exercises.  With a pen and paper handy, prepare to consider edges (of bodies, of sentences, of continents) as sites of decay, renewal, and, crucially, encounter. 

Here are some soft suggestions for further reading — for either before or after listening: 

Renee Gladman’s introduction to her book Prose Architectures, Wave Books, 2017

Karen Barad’s “Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings” from GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2015

(The title of this piece is a line taken from Bill Nye’s episode on Erosion, Season 5 Episode 14, which I highly recommend: it is excellent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27dUMzUJvl8 )

ABOUT THE ARTIST

P Sazani is a writer, artist, and teacher living and working in Los Angeles. She writes science fiction about religion, poetry about matter, and essays about performance. She is one half of the All-Wash-Away Sacred Harp Singers of Los Angeles (AWASH), an experimental publication collective interested in semiotic disaster. Through AWASH she edits DanceNotes, a chapbook series that publishes experiments in dance notation. Her writing has been performed in Los Angeles at REDCAT, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the Women’s Center for Creative Work, the mortuary, and Beyond Baroque, and has been published by Wolfman Books, Vallum, and Riting. She is currently finishing a fellowship at CalArts.

HB/AV: every particle of sand carries a piece of the mountain away (P Sazani, 2020)

Heavy Breathing presents, To Your Under, 
a brief exercise in pedal dexterity, neural elasticity, subliminal reality, and fluid personality. By Ross Simonini, read by Audrey Vignoles.

To Your Under

Heavy Breathing A/V is a series of artist-led audio experiences that combine somatic awareness with critical thinking. Critical thinking often feels heady, abstract, and divorced from the body. How do conversations change when we are moving our bodies and out of breath? What new modes of thinking become possible? Visit us at heavyheavybreathing.com / IG: HeavyHeavyBreathing / Facebook: heavyheavybreathing