Breathing with Alexis Pauline Gumbs
[Felix Loftus]
“the problematic core construct was that in order to be sane, which is to live in one body, which is to live one lifetime at one time, which is to disconnect from the black simultaneity of the universe, you could and must deny black femininity. and somehow breathe. the fundamental fallacy being (obvious now. obscured at the time.) that there is no separation from the black simultaneity of the universe also known as everything also known as the black feminist pragmatic intergenerational sphere. everything is everything.”
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M-Archive, 2018. p.7
Referencing M. Jacqui Alexander, 2006. p.289
1.
Introduction [shallow breathing]
This project starts where I was.
Which, consequently, is the place
you are now.
the place where you are told to
Breathe Motherf*cker.
I read this from the T-shirt of a
man with a gleaming head
action-ready sunglasses
firmly on top.
SUCK THAT AIR IN AND BREATHE
Bold-face type, white on black.
He gets off at the next stop,
the train hauls me forward
warm
heavy air
pressing
down
I step off into
Tomorrow. No time to forget
yesterday
Today, I improve.
Today, I stop tumbling
Into the present
I wipe the moisture from
my forehead,
cheeks and neck
flicked away so that
action-ready, here I am
This is diaphragmatic breathing.
And I’m here to
improve
your
life.
Each day
just slip me 5
you’ll generate deepness
you didn’t know existed
each and every day.
This is di-a-phrag-matic breathing
and I’m here to
optimise
that
body
This is your new life,
And you run this shit.
Above is an assemblage of my thoughts while researching the breathing practices of various wellness apps. The poem is comprised of sound-bites from Ted Talks and wellness apps, that make use of some form of reduction or appropriation, in order to invigorate your breathing and improve your mental health. In her Ted-talk ‘Breath- five minutes can change your life’, Stacey Schuerman leads an exercise designed to ‘reset, renew, and rejuvenate our energy’ in only 5 minutes, dismissing other breathing practices that don’t fit into the tidy 5-minute model with the phrase ’ain’t nobody got time for that.’ (Schuerman, 2014) ‘ExhaleExhaleExhale… I can’t hear your breathing!’ says another coach before equating breath to an optimisable tool. (Rockwood, 2018) In the social imaginary that I perceive surrounds breathing practices, breathing is taken to be a biological function that if practiced correctly, can be employed for individual improvement [optimisation]. Breathing as an anti-anxiety medication. Breathing as useful but little else. Consistently underlying these practices is a figuration of the human which is always a unitary body, here, where you are, in the present. These practices figure the human as an individual that strives for self-improvement [over-others]. ‘Optimised’ breathing is then breathing that allows for success in neoliberal society. As such this style of breath is intimately connected with and implicated in the racialised and hierarchical structures of society.
Gotta be better, more productive. Fuck… I bet others are achieving more in quarantine…
Holistic healing of families, communities and ecosystems across the world is infrequently discussed as a goal of these breathing practices. Improvement of relationships with families and friends is often a biproduct, but the overall aim is always centred on the individual.
I have - as well as many who read this, I’m sure - found this use of breathing calming and useful. Following the guidance of wellness apps has helped me through various panic attacks, and put me to sleep in stress filled stretches of life.
In this essay, I do not wish to directly critique this conception of breathing, although a critique does underlie my work. It should be enough to simply point to this individualistic conception of breathing, to remind us that it exists, and is deeply entangled within a western neoliberal context and is connected to capitalist appropriation from and reduction of cultures. This conception also contributes to and is entangled within a capitalist prescription of the human as an atomistic, competitive, and hierarchical subject. I take this individualistic conception of breathing to be that of western Man and will refer to it as such.
Instead, this essay assimilates Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Black Feminist metaphysical stance which tells us that no matter how deep the inhale is, with this western Male conception of breathing we can only have shallow breaths.
2.
Introduction [deep breathing]
“they looked each other in the eyes every time and did not leave each other without singing a prayer: the name or the wish. they learned to add touching hands into the ritual, a tradition newly sacred after the memory of the epidemic.
and of course none of that would have been possible if they didn’t remember to look themselves in the eye every morning. or to chant the name of the prayer. or to track their dreams for keeping and sharing.
there is a sacredness to every day. every time.
it means again and again. it means all of us. it means this moment. this time. you and me. we’re here. which was something they would never again take for granted.”
M-Archive, 2018. p104
M. Jacqui Alexander, 2006. p.13
While I sit here, trying to remain afloat amidst the shockwaves of Covid-19, it is more clear than ever to understand how our breath is networked with wider systems that structure our world, systems fixed solely on the present moment, ignoring future generations, and future ecosystems. The scale of the Covid-19 pandemic has forcibly exposed the connections between industrial agribusiness and health, between how capitalist perceptions of time and our ability to breathe. As black feminists have scientifically predicted, through persistent analysis, the planet is quickly becoming unbreathable and the resultant suffering is organized around pre-existing hierarchies and structures of race, gender, sexuality, ableism and class. (Sharpe, 2017, The Weather)
What is required to make the planet breathable, now?
How can we heal?
How can we breathe on an unbreathable planet?
These are the principle concerns of my project. By working with a black feminist methodology, in this essay I prepare the grounds for a computational and artistic breathing practice that responds to these questions. I use this essay to explore how to create deeper breathing now and for future generations, and how to shatter a western Male conception of breathing. I take deep breathing to be breathing that heals and makes the world breathable again. This essay outlines my research into deep breathing, and is guided by the philosophy of the self-proclaimed ‘Queer Black Troublemaker’ and ‘Black Feminist Love Evangelist’ Alexis Pauline Gumbs. The impetus of my research is Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ idea that deep, healing, breathing requires a conception of the ‘human’ that is both intersubjective and intergenerational, which is presented in her book M-Archive: After the end of the world. (Gumbs, 2018, footnote 1) By intersubjective I mean existing through all others and by intergenerational I mean existing with past and future generations. My research looks to where deep breathing already exits, in communal sonic practices.
This project is also guided by practitioners who engage with breath and research into breath to engender deeper breathing, now and for future generations. The poets, writers, musicians and healers who have informed this project. Ashon T Crawley, Ama Josephine Budge, Pamela Z, Dj Lady Lane amongst many others. (footnote 2)
Breath, as displacement of air, is sonic. I decided to limit my research by following this dimension of breath in relation to computational practices. This led me to Pauline Oliveros’ communal listening practices, and specifically her Sonic Meditations which use breathing techniques to help form intersubjective connections between people. Through the notion of breath as sonic, I began to research existing black poetic uses of sonic technologies which embrace intergenerational thinking and create spaces to breathe, dream and resist in constricted conditions. I looked to soundsystem cultures in Jamaica, the UK and to the contemporary sound artist Elsa M’bala (footnote 3). This technopoetic research was collated into a short audio piece which embraces Sylvia Wynter’s idea of poetics. I have also written a series of speculative narratives to think through deeper breathing, which embrace fictional worlds as real sites of understanding. Each narrative has its base in my research into the sonics of breath, and aims to illuminate specific networks that restrict breathing and to present ideas of how breathing practices could be intergenerational, intersubjective, and interspecies based.
To conclude I give an idea of a computational artistic practice based on the insights of my research. This practice is based on the form of Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations and uses technopoetic sonic techniques. I planned to create this artistic breathing practice through collaboration with sound practitioners; artists and choirs. Covid-19 has unfortunately stunted this progress, and so it remains an idea to be fulfilled at a later date.
Before engaging with my research into the sonics of breath it is first necessary to understand some of the black feminist theoretical underpinnings of my research, specifically Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ philosophy of breath in her book M-Archive, and a black feminist principle of disrupting the hegemonic conception of the category of Man.
3.
M-Archive: After the end of the world
“you can have breathing and the reality of the radical black porousness of love (aka black feminist metaphysics aka us all of us, us) or you cannot. there is only both or neither. there is no either or. there is no this or that. there is only all.
this was their downfall. they hated the black women who were themselves. a suicidal form of genocide. so that was it. they could only make the planet unbreathable.”
M-Archive, 2018. p7
M. Jacqui Alexander p.289
M-Archive is the second book in Gumbs’ triptych. A speculative narrative comprised of poetic fragments that document how black lives persist after the world ends. Each fragment engages with an idea from M. Jacqui Alexander’s work ‘Pedagogies of Crossing.’ In M-Archive and in Dub [the third book in the triptych] it is suggested that we could breathe deeply if we were to recognise that our breathing stretches beyond the physical and that our breathing touches and is touched by our ancestors and by those who share the earth with us. Through her idea of breathing Gumbs figures the self as communal [intersubjective] yet unique. In answer to the metaphysical question of the nature of the self, Gumbs answers that everything is everything and I am you but I≠you. Equals signs do a violence to you and to the word ‘is’. I am you but you are still you. (M-Archive, p.17) Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Black feminist metaphysics embraces spilling into each other. It sees productive potential in poetics and hybrids, and goes beyond taxonomy and hierarchy.
Harmoniously, Gumbs recognises that you are now, here in this present, yet you are also always, everywhere. (M-Archive, p.139, 141) Through a ceaseless displacement of exterior into interior, your breath, like the movement of the tides, stretches out from the past and into the future while holding your present. To the metaphysical question of the nature of time, Gumbs says that through its incessant and disruptive flow, breath is time. So, we breathe as ourselves and also as one, with past, present, and future times.
To breathe with someone, then, is to recognise their breath as yours, now. This recognition is a healing force. Breathing with someone keeps you both alive. If we recognise the other in us, the blackness of being, then we, as a vast and intricate collective, can breathe.
We could breathe deeply,
if we breathe with and for.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs tells us that Black feminist metaphysics is breathing
Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks us to breathe with black womxn
4.
Disrupting the Category of Man
“There is, too, a connection between the lungs and the weather: the supposedly transformative properties of breathing free air—that which throws off the mantle of slavery—and the transformative properties of being ‘free’ to breathe fresh air. These discourses run through freedom narratives habitually. But who has access to freedom? Who can breathe free? Those narratives do not ameliorate this lack; this lack is the atmosphere of antiblackness.”
Christina Sharpe, 2016, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Gumbs’ philosophy is inextricable from the black feminist principle of disrupting the hegemonic conception of humanity as being synonymous with western Man. So, this must be considered to form an idea of an artistic breathing practice aligned with Alexis Pauline Gumbs. This principle was pioneered through the intellectual labour of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter and is sustained through the work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Denis De Ferreira da Silva. (footnote 4) Their work is invaluable in exposing the role that ‘racializing assemblages play in the formation of modern selfhood’ through which non-white subjects are excluded from the category of human and so are dehumanised (Weheliye, 2014, pp.11-14). This principle recognises that the category of human is a heuristic site [a site of learning] rather than an pre-existing reality. In line with this principle, my project considers conceptions of breathing that are otherwise to a mode synonymous with Man which is taken here to be the idea that breathing exists on an individual level, through one body, in the present.
Accordingly, in my practice I look to communal practices and to how breathing exists in places where the air is polluted, and in bodies of people whose breath is forcibly restricted by the exploitation of the capitalist system. These are vital locations for understanding breath and for imagining a different world. (Kim 2018)
Invaluable to structuring a black feminist breathing practice is Alexander Weheliye’s question:
“What different modalities of the human come to light if we do not take the liberal humanist figure of Man as the master-subject but focus on how humanity has been imagined and lived by those subjects excluded from this domain?”
Weheliye. Habeas Viscus, p.8
In relation to breathing this question asks: what can we learn from how breathing exists where it is restricted? And, as Christina Sharpe asks, can ‘free’ breathing be imagined outside the ideal of fresh air?
How can artistic practices help answer these questions?
Here, we are led to the anoxic. Breath without air. In ‘Dub: Finding Ceremony’ Alexis Pauline Gumbs proceeds along this thread to write about the breath of her ancestors; the cyanobacteria who first produced oxygen in the Great Oxidation event around 2.4 billion years ago. We could also look to spirochetes who live in anoxic conditions under the surface of the earth. I have also researched into communal sonic practices.
In my narratives I playfully explore how we could apply these practices into other domains to engender deeper breathing. For example, researchers have shown that the oxygen production of algae can be significantly increased when the algae is exposed to sound. (Weiming 2013) But this has only been attempted in lab conditions, with ‘pure’ sine frequency pulses in the order of magnitude of hundreds: 800hz, 1000hz…
How would algae respond to gospel music? Or Detroit techno?
5.
Sonics of Breath [Dark Water]
The ambient noise on your oceanic
field recording
is the sound
of algaeic oxygen production
the amniotic hum
that resonates
with now
the provenance of vibration
the labor of your diaphragm
Dunaliella viridis
Prochloro-
coccus
Gut
weed
the [the individual] collectives
phylogenetic understandings of time
you,
there resounding
into a bass
line
a sonic revolution
that breathes
healing breaths
the great oxidation event
wrack and carrageen
recordings at 24kbit/s
listening without sound
[to]
spectral winds
bringing songs of
bringing songs of
now.
spirochetes thrive in anoxic
conditions
spiro for coil
chete - khaite
meaning long hair
the kick drum contracts
in regimented fashion
driving through a factory assembly line
No master clock
Marches forward
The sonic revolution
breathing
Healing breaths
Of survival (footnote 5)
Breath is a sonic vibration, comprised of bands of noise. Higher frequencies form the inhale while the exhale occupies lower ranges. Woven within this dense spectrum of frequencies are threads from history and from across the world. Our primary sensual encounters with sound are through hearing and feeling. The throb of a baseline catches your attention, and draws you into its embrace as much as the notes the baseline is comprised of. The sonic practices referred to below create sites where breathing is easier and help us to imagine a world where breathing is easier for all. I conclude this section with ideas of how to create a healing breathing practice.
Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations
The sound artist and theorist Pauline Oliveros drew a distinction between hearing and listening. Hearing is taken to be a biological function of the ear that allows humans to recognise sound. Hearing is passive, disengaged. But if I focus my hearing into the room I’m writing in I notice specific sounds that comprise the ambient noise of this room. Before focussing I recognised there was noise but had not considered the specifics. When I focus my hearing I start to listen. (Oliveros, 2005)
Listening is active, engaged. Listening brings with it experience which helps to relate the sonic data to emotional knowledge and sensual knowledge. By listening I can recognise the high tweet that occasionally enters my room as the sound of a bird, and this allows me to connect with the outside world.
Oliveros developed a set of listening practices which attempt to figure breathing as communal despite prescribed individualism, titled the Sonic Meditations. They aim for participants to breathe with each other. They are presented as a musical score, though the interior is unfamiliar compared with standard scores. They are comprised of short sets of written instructions. A group are asked to participate by following the instructions. Each Meditation focusses the group on listening, predominately to each other’s breathing.
Sonic Meditation 1. Teach Yourself to Fly:
Any number of persons sit in a circle facing the center. Illuminate the space with a dim blue light. Begin by simply observing your own breathing. Always be an observer. Gradually allow your breathing to become audible. Then gradually introduce your voice. Allow your vocal chords to vibrate in any mode which occurs naturally. Allow the intensity to increase slowly. Continue as long as possible naturally, and until all others are quiet. always observing your own breath cycle.
Pauline Oliveros, 1971
The Meditations were formed slowly and collaboratively during routine sessions over the course of nine weeks. Having practiced these with friends I found them to be generative sources for breathing intersubjectively. The form of following instructions helped to connect ideas about breathing to physically breathing.
I then turned to trying to reconfigure the Sonic Meditations to align with black feminism. One consistent aspect of the sonic meditations is that they take your immediate surroundings and company as a starting point for breathing practices.
I am interested in what these meditations could be if they did not take this as a starting point but instead listened to other sites, specifically to sites where breath is restricted, and tried to engender intersubjective breathing with these sites. This could help to imagine breathing outside of the constraints of one body. Ashon T Crawley suggests we listen to Black Pentecostal breathing to hear how numerous breaths can slowly synchronise from disparate paces without a master clock holding pace, which helps us understand the intersubjectivity of breath. (Crawley and Onli, 2018) Audio and video samples of other sonic practices could be beneficial to a black feminist breathing practice and would help to centre black voices and histories.
Using audio and video samples lends itself to computational methods. Rather than a written score, I propose an interactive website [or an app]. I believe collaboration would be essential to create this practice to ensure a multiplicity of black voices are breathed with. (footnote 6)
Black Technopoetics and Soundsystem Culture
Black sonic practitioners have consistently utilized the revolutionary potentialities of sound, as a means of resisting oppression and creating sites for both healing and imagining a different world. In soundsystem culture, the sound engineer’s tuning of the speakers, the producers dubbing techniques, and the MC’s lyrics come together in a holistic technological practice. (Henriques, 2016) Dub poets harness the magnetic pull of a sub stack to convey political messages. Linton Kwesi Johnson used reggae songs as a vessel for socialist politics. (Austin, 2018) Jean Binta Breeze has frequently critiqued the IMF in her dub poetry. Moor Mother develops this practice into contemporary music, delivering political messages on techno inflected dance tracks. 7 Listening to a recording of Ranking Ann at a Miners Benefit in Sheffield in 1984 showcases this holistic technological approach.
https://sheffieldtapearchive.bandcamp.com/track/right-to-fight-ranking-ann-tippa-irie-daddy-colonel
You can hear Ann decrying discriminatory immigration measures, police brutality, and capitalist greed in relation to coal miners over a fast, pounding, baseline. Ann calls to the audience, engaging them directly in these political statements. This practice is intimately related to breathing. The music of the soundsystem creates a site for breathing in the present, while Ann’s words breathe with and for future generations by invigorating action to free communities from oppressive structures. For me, the important combination is the emotive bodily force of the soundsystem’s bass combining with vocal pedagogy. I would like to transfer this idea into an artistic breathing practice.
In discussions with sound artist Elsa M’bala, she told me that she uses sampling as a way to transcend time and work intergenerationally. Samples are histories, which Elsa lets breathe and speak through her sonic work. In her ‘Addis’63’ project M’bala uses samples from a speech of the Pan Africanist leader Kwama Nkrumah in 1963 in combination with live synthesized sounds and her own poetry. This brings Nkrumah’s thought into the present and allows it to breathe again.
I believe that remembering black feminist histories like Ranking Ann’s, through fragmented audio recordings, is an important technique for constructing an artistic breathing practice as it allows black voices to be centred. This could be done through simply playing these samples and asking participants to listen to certain aspects of the recordings. However, through technopoetics these samples could be made more forceful.7 Freezing the crowds response to Ranking Ann’s “we have a right to fight” and allowing this sound to fill a room might allow participants to emote more strongly with the message. To develop these ideas I created a poetic audio piece in collaboration with Gazelle Mba.
We experimented with a collection of historical audio fragments and breathing samples and used technopoetic audio techniques [in openFrameworks and ableton] to draw connections between different sonic revolutionaries and breathing. The piece follows Sylvia Wynter’s conception of poetics as an act of creative, anti-capitalist production.
Conclusion
I started this project by asking myself how I could work with Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ philosophy to help build a breathing practice that heals. Following the sonics of breath has helped me come to understand that breath is intersubjective and intergenerational. I now feel confident in creating a sonic breathing practice that centers listening to black voices to engender deeper breathing in the future. Below are links to an ongoing set of science-fiction narratives about breathing practices that continue to develop my thoughts about this relationship between listening and breathing:
Footnotes
1. For intersubjective thought see pp.6-7, p.107. For intergenerational though p.129, p.161, p.165
2. See Ashon T. Crawley’s Black Pentecostal Breath, 2016. This book was essential for inspiring me into the possible healing effects of breathing practices. --- See Pamela Z’s inter-media audio piece: “Breathing”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7AZsQoD630 --- DJ Lady Lane/Rena Anakwe’s ‘Exploration in Non-Western Communal healing Practices’ was important for developing an idea of how sound art and healing can combine. https://soundcloud.com/djladylane/explorations-in-non-western-communal-healing-practices-on-montez-press-radio Ama Josephine Budge’s communal breathing practice creates healing modes of socialisation through breath https://www.ica.art/learning/breathe-speculate-come
3. Also known as AMET, Elsa M’bala is a Cameroonian sound artist. She uses a combination of synthesised sounds, recordings of her own poetry, field recordings, and archival material to create powerful audio piece. Notably, she draws on the aesthetics of CyberSpace. For short form work listen to “You Had Me – Amet” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvsvkt4wehY For long form work this is a clip from her work for the Berlin Biennale 2018 https://soundcloud.com/elsambala/berlin-biennale-2018-short
4. For more on this Black Feminist Principle I recommend Hortense Spillers talk Shades of Intimacy: What the Eighteenth Century Teaches Us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10haBLXN1r0&t=1299s Denise Ferrera da Silva’s talk Hacking the Subject: Black Feminism, Refusal, and the Limits of Critique has also taught me about this methodology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3B5Gh2JSQg&t=2s
5. This poem was inspired by learning about oceanic bacteria from the Tidalectics exhibition booklet and radio shows. See https://www.tba21.org/#item--tidalectics--1623 Particularly Ana Vaz and Nuno Da Luz's audio piece. This poem was also inspired by Citizen Sense's Phytosensor book https://citizensense.net/phyto-sensor-workshop/ Sarah Keartes "Photosynthesis makes a sound" article also features in this work https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/photosynthesis-makes-a-sound/
6. This idea is related to Martine Syms work Lessons I-XXX, 2014 which tells a poem in 180 incomplete fragments. The fragments are programmed so that they do not repeat.See Jean Binta Breeze’s “Aid Travels With a Bomb” in Riddym Ravings, 1988, Race Today Publications. Listen to Moor Mother’s After Images, 2019. On Don Giovanni Records. Listen also to Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Dread Beat An’ Blood, 1978. Front Line Records
7. Martine Syms work is also relevant to this practice
Bibliography
Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath. 2016, Oxford: Fordham University Press
Crawley is a Professor of Religious Studies and African-America and African Studies. He was also a regular participant and organist at a Black Pentecostal church throughout his adolescence. In Blackpentecostal Breath Crawley criticaly examines the blackpentecostal breathing practices of whooping, shouting, noise-making, and speaking in tongues. He recognizes that these practices generate alternative modes of sociality which are a ‘disruption against the marginalization of and violence against majoritarian life’.
Sylvia Wynter’s Conception of Poetics
Sylvia Wynter’s defines the poetic as ‘that which creates new relationships between human beings, each other and their environment by seeking (and failing) to describe what those relationships could be, beyond objectification, in a manner that is disruptive of the product to product relationship of capitalism”. [Gumbs’ reading of Wynter “Ethno or Socio Poetic” in Alcheringa]
Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminism. 2014
Habeas Viscus contains vital analysis of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter’s work that helped me understand the importance of the category of the Human in black studies. Using Wynter’s and Spillers’ work he exposes how the category of the Human has been used to create a hierarchy comprised of humans, not-quite-humans and nonhumans. This socio-political process allows numerous peoples to be ‘rendered disposable by the pernicious logics of racialization, and thus exposed to different forms of political violence on a daily basis’. (p. 14)
References:
Austin, D., 2018. Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution. Pluto Press
Crawley, A. T., 2016. Blackpentecostal Breath. Oxford: Fordham University Press.
Crawley, A. T. in conversation with Onli, M 2018, NTS.
https://www.nts.live/shows/guests/episodes/black-spirituals-13th-may-2018
Chude-Sokei, L., 2015. The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics. Wesleyan University Press.
Ferreira da Silva, D., 2015. Hacking the Subject: Black Feminism, Refusal, and the Limits of Critique. Barnard College
Gumbs, A. P., 2018. M Archive: After the End of the World. Duke University Press
Gumbs, A. P., 2020. Dub: Finding Ceremony. Duke University Press
Henriques, J., 2016. Situating Sound: The Space and Time of a Dancehall Session. Goldsmiths College, University of London
Kim, J., 2018. Pollutants in the Playground: Why some children are worse affected by our polluted air. It’s Freezing in LA.
M’bala, E., 2017. Addis’63. 3HD festival
http://3hd-festival.com/2017/artists/amet
Q & A with Elsa M’bala on Addis'63
M’bala, E., 2018. Voices Unheard. Berlin Biennale.
https://bb10.berlinbiennale.de/artists/e/elsa-mbala
M. Jacqui Alexander, 2006. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Duke University Press
Oliveros, P., 1971. Sonic Meditations. Smith Publications.
Oliveros, P., 2005. Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. New York: iUniverse, Inc.
Rockwood, L., 2018. Change Your Breath, Change Your Life. Tedx Talks
Schuerman, S., 2014. Breath – five minutes can change your life. Tedx Talks
Sharpe, C., 2016. In The Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press. Chapter 4 ‘The Weather’ is particularly relevant here. See also Yusoff, K. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press
Weheliye, A. G., 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke University Press
Weiming C., Ning W., Nurhan T. D., Songming Z. Huinong H., 2013. Study of Audible Sound Effect on Algae Growth. American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, St. Joseph, Michigan
Wynter, S., 1976. Ethno or Sociopoetics. Alcheinga Vol. 2 No. 2 pp. 78-94