Wading Breath is a performative sound walk on Isola La Certosa, Venice. By using umbrellas as collective listening devices, we move as a porous, shifting body, seeking to form a temporary assembly – an acoustic shelter that reveals the fragility of the Venetian salt marsh, its inhabitants and stored memory.
«we breathe / change / breathe the variation of the seabed the changes of salinity the oxygen of phytoplankton the morphology of the sea bed»
It connects our own breathing, diaphragm and voice to unheard acoustics beneath the surface. By listening to recorded sounds of photosynthesis, fish songs, moving crabs and undefined signals from the lagoon, you are invited to engage with underwater life forms and reflect on the connections between much larger paradoxes present in similar vulnerable lowlands around the world. Wading Breath seeks for wading, walking or standing in shallow water without shoes or socks; and to breathe with, the act of taking air into the lungs and sending it out; to form acoustic kin with underwater life and approaching organic matter through sound.
CREDITS
Conception, direction, sound: Rahel Kraft
Performer: Alessandra Grieco, Tomoko Hojo
Microchip Programming: Urban Lienert
Documentation: Pietro Consolandi
Co-Production: Palazzo Trevisan Venice
Production: Cie Nobuo
Support: Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Kulturstiftung des Kantons Thurgau, Kunstkredit Basel Stadt
