Cloud Chamber demonstration + BREAT(HOLD) workshop

Join the curators Indira Dyussebayeva-Ziyabek and Maria Hinel for a tour of Carbon, Carbon Everywhere, featuring artists Emii Alrai, Kate Daudy, Konstantin Novoselov, Susan Eyre, Ania Mokrzycka, Simon Faithfull, Nissa Nishikawa, Mariele Neudecker, Anousha Payne, Aimée Parrott, Lucia Pizzani, Lizi Sanchez and Meng Zhou. The exhibition explores carbon's shifting states - an element threading through organic and inorganic matter, linking bodies, environments, and temporal scales.

Alongside the tour Susan Eyre invites visitors to view her cloud chamber which was used to capture footage of the ephemeral trails of cosmic rays as seen in the video Cosmic Chiasmus: crossing the universe.

Cosmic rays are fast moving particles, blasted across space, spiralling along magnetic field lines to end up entangled with carbon in our bodies. They are raining down on Earth all the time. Although they are called rays they are not like photons of light as they have mass but they do travel at nearly the speed of light. At ground level two to three cosmic particles pass through your hand every second, deep underground this is reduced to about once a month.

Not only is all life physically permeated by cosmic rays with the potential for nuclei collisions but some cascading particles smash into atoms of nitrogen to create carbon-14. Carbon-14 then combines with oxygen in the atmosphere to create radioactive carbon-dioxide - this is ingested by plants and animals through the food cycle. Plants absorb it during photosynthesis, and it is incorporated into their carbon skeleton which we then eat. When an organism dies no more Carbon-14 is absorbed and that which is present starts to decay at a constant rate. By measuring the radioactivity of dead organic matter, the current carbon-14 content can be determined and the time of death established. Cosmic ray activity gives us carbon dating techniques.

BREAT(HOLD) workshop with Ania Mokrzycka

“I could tell innumerable other stories, and they would all be true (...) the number of atoms is so great that one could always be found whose story coincides with any capriciously invented story.”

The workshop takes Primo Levi’s essay Carbon as a starting point, while drawing on my research around submersion, conceptual displacement (Melody Jue), more-than-sonic listening, memory, non-linear time

and writing as a transversal listening practice. It is one of an ongoing series of experiments engaging with “inner motions and hidden sonorities of elemental media,” (Margarida Mendes), here thinking specifically about carbon and its journeys within and without our bodies.

“It was caught by the wind, flung down on the earth, lifted ten kilometers high. It was breathed in by a flacon, descending into its precipitous lungs, but did not penetrate its rich blood and was expelled. It dissolved three times in the water of the sea, once in the water of a cascading torrent, and again was expelled. It traveled with the wind for eight years: now high, now low, on the sea and among the clouds, over forests, deserts, and limitless expanses of ice; then it stumbled into capture and the organic adventure.”

Informed by the practice of freediving, we will explore breath work - diaphragmatic breathing (belly breathing) and Ujjayi breathing, as well as take time to find and maintain our respective tidal breathing rhythms. We will engage in mental visualisations during breath-hold, paying attention and listening to our sensations as the carbon dioxide levels rise in our body, only to be expelled into the space between us - “a ridiculous remnant, an ‘impurity’ (...) which nobody even notices.”

“Once again the wind, which this time travels far; sails over the Apennines and the Adriatic, Greece, the Aegean, and Cyprus: we are over Lebanon, and the dance is repeated.”

We will then do writing/drawing exercises, which can take a multiplicity of forms. You will be asked to keep in mind the relationship between writing and listening-sensing; to think of writing not as representation, but writing-as-listening.

“It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.”

We will conclude with a communal sharing.

* This workshop will involve breath-work and practicing voluntary breath-hold. While performed at a duration defined by and comfortable for each and every participant, some planned exercises are not recommended for those with cardiovascular and respiratory conditions, epilepsy or aneurysms.

However, you can still participate in all the activities if you cannot or do not feel comfortable with holding your breath or any other breathing exercises.

Please avoid consuming caffeine and sugar before the workshop to keep the heart rate low.