‘Holding Breath’

This paper reflects on ‘Holding Breath’, an ongoing project, to consider ethical and methodological questions at the heart of its conceptualization and development. Conceived as a co-creative and collective, community-based sound project, the goal was to explore creative possibilities for collective listening, witnessing, care and connection in the wake of pandemic grief (and beyond). In the first stage of the project (the focus of this paper), the project collaborated with women and trans non-binary people who live with the debilitating impacts of Long COVID. Our breathless embodiments would be the starting point to gently explore unevenly shared and felt thresholds of experience. Through a series of intimate, generative, and reciprocal encounters using an asynchronous exchange of voice-note memos (making, sharing, responding, and reflecting) and verbatim recordings, we explored modes of listening that were ‘difference-attuned’ (Rice et al., 2021) and sensitive to ‘the breath of another’ (Szörényi, 2022). Bringing together intersectional feminist approaches to listening and disability justice approaches to care as radical inter-dependence (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018), this paper reflects on the creative development stage of ‘Holding Breath’, my own situated experience within the work drawn from field note entries, and the broader structures and relations that prompted and haunt its creation – including who has access to ‘care’, on what terms, and whose experiences and lives are prioritized, heard, and valued (Wong, 2020). Invoking breath(lessness) as method – breaths held, moments of pause, slowness, discomfort, debilitation – I recount the ways a collective archive (sonic, mediated, feminist) might orient us towards ethical protocols for listening and witnessing across thresholds of experience for (post)pandemic times.