February 2022
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Carolyn Craig (NSW)
Bacterial Nervosa

Bacterial Nervosa isolates breathe and the voice to consider how power operates over the body. These sites are chosen as they articulate sound as agency (survival) and breathe as survival. Even the soft undertone of expelled breathe fuels life, voices desire (and dissent) and is targeted in acts of violence to silence agency and remove life. In particular, I am interested in ERV (the expiratory reserve volume), considered as the amount of excess air that we do not inhale and the residual amount of stale air that we do not exhale. I see this negative valued (potential air) as an accounting record of social presence, or erasure. The more enabled or privileged the subject- the more deeply they breathe. The higher your social privilege the more oxygen you can access – the more time you have to learn to yoga breathe –and the less likely you are to be sat on by a police officer.

Bodies in fear take shallow, husky breathes. Bodies subject to violence fight against a strangulation that extends into everything. This body of work uses the performative trace of print to build a personal breathing apparatus – to make copies of acts of survival to reclaim a presence in a world that seems to be negating space all around me.