learning how to breathe.
learning how to breathe (2025)
performance + sonic art piece
Poetry + performance by Janilda Bartolomeu
Vocals by Lily Spencer
Sound Design by Kems Kriol
EXHIBITION
Gestures of Abundance
Walk & Talk Bienal des Artes
7 November 2025 - 30 November 2025
learning how to breathe is a sonic artwork and participatory performance birthed from Janilda Bartolomeu’s fascination with the whaling histories connecting the Azores and Cabo Verde, the act of puncturing lungs, and mammalian kinship.
It is a rumination on breathing in circumstances that should be impossible. We live in a global order that feeds on the violence which prevents us — human, non-human, living beings in general — from breathing. An order in which the dreams of one simply devour the other’s. By embracing one of the regenerative states of collective living, grief, the work seeks a path towards an existential dependence with respirational knowledge as its compass.
In a fragile and finite collaboration, Janilda Bartolomeu and singer Lily Spencer harmonise in two transmuting iterations of breath: poetry and singing. Passing by reflection, in relation and in mourning ritual. Counting down to another end of the world.
The sonic piece was played in Ponta Delgada’s amphitheatre at the end of each hour and in the same rhythm sperm whales come up to breathe. The amphitheatre look out point on which people gather to wave goodbye to ships departing onto the Atlantic Ocean. In the participatory performance Bartolomeu, harmonised with this piece, improvising poetic ad-libs and ushering the audience into movement. A ritual resulting in the collective becoming one big milling, grieving and breathing organism.
The documentation of the performance has yet to be shared by Walk & Talk.
* learning how to breathe is part of Janilda Bartolomeu’s ‘whaling trilogy’ consisting of artworks situated in the triangular territory between the United States (in the belly), The Azores (learning how to breathe) and Cabo Verde (t.b.a.).