Breathing on Language, Capitol, and Possibility
Mitchell Squire Studio
“Mask-up”, “maintain social distance”, “we’re at the limit of available ventilators”, “have you experienced shortness of breath?”, “get your knee off our necks!”, “I CAN’T BREATHE!, I CAN’T BREATHE!, I CAN’T BREATHE! Breathlessness is all around us. We are in a grip that is suffocating social respiration on every level imaginable.
Prompt
Design and produce a material apparatus (a minor architecture with major implications) that supports and visualizes your body’s only purpose of existence is to breathe. Situated in an open landscape create a series of self-portraits and a 1-minute performance video (landscape orientation) featuring the apparatus in use.
Phase 2: Body without Organs
“Body without Organs” (BwO). According to Berardi, the Body without Organs is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. But it can be occupied only by intensities that pass through and/or circulate about it.”
Prompt
Create a technical line drawing of your apparatus/BwO/tantric egg that delineates the intensities that have passed through it, the gradients of differentiation which may have lingered, and the threshold across which all these intensities may have moved. This drawing must reveal the web of possibilities.
5' x 2' hand drawing with ink and graphite.
Phase 3: On the U.S. Capitol - Sacred and Profane
Create an exquisite 3D model and two exquisite 3D drawings of the United States Capitol that reignite the conversation and Kent Wilson’s work which began in 2015, but moves it further in light of the recent January 06, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Handmade resin blocks with fabric.
Handmade water capturing system used to purify the land which the capitol sits upon.
Atman is the singular breath of each sensitive and conscious organism, it is life of the innermost essence of that organism. Here, I amusing the landscape to inhabit the lessons of atman. Because in many ways, that landscape is the oldest and most sensitive conscious organism. It is aware of everything that comes and goes, it is seen and quietly observing.
The landscape which the capitol sits upon is a burdened landscape – full of missed opportunities, broken promise, and above all pain. It is what I, as a landscape architect would call a cultural landscape. But what makes this capitol landscape one of culture? How has it represented our culture? For most, I would say that is hasn’t. The capitol and it’s inhabits have created this toxic sewage of erasure and pain that now soaks beneath the capitol surface, below the walls and into the soil, or into the landscape. And it continues to sit and settle as we speak.
I’m arguing that this reconceptualization of the capitol must go beyond the exterior structure of that capitol, that the building itself is no loner serving it’s intended purpose and has become useless to reconceptualize it’s framework. We must go beneath in order to amend this pain.
In this final model and performance, I explore the interior of my previous resin blocks. Expanding this microbial process into a physical experiences or ritual. This seemed most necessary when thinking about my own body within the capitol landscape. This suspended model holds the purest form of energy exchange, one of water, one of growth and one of cyclical healing.
Using myself to aid the process of the plants growth is the beginning of the ritual. Through filtration of poured water, I will collect this soothed water and bring it to the nearest capitol site and inject this water onto and into its landscape. Mending the existing burdened landscape. This ritual can and will continue until each layer becomes restored.