CCA Glasgow and Ignota Hosts: ‘Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum’

CCA Glasgow and Ignota Hosts: ‘Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum’

On 30 November 2021, CCA Glasgow and Ignota hosted Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva for a screening of their new film Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum, and a discussion with James Goodwin. Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum was accompanied by a performance of Treble Heaven by Nisha Ramayya and MJ Harding.

Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum by artist Arjuna Neuman and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva continues their interest in reimagining knowledge and existence without the limits of European and Colonial constructions of the human. To speculate how to exist otherwise as humans in the world, they traverse from quantum mechanics to polyrhythms, from Tarkovsky to Hype Williams, from heat to Anaximander.

Following the element of earth through its many facets, groundings, afterlifes and forms, Soot Breath scales between the historical/cultural, the organic, the quantum and the cosmic. Gathering a variety of examples where subjectivity is unbound from the mind alone, but rebound to the world, Soot Breath examines how structures of power break material ties to other humans, more-than-humans and deeper implicated bonds with our planet and beyond.

Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum is a film dedicated to tenderness. It reproduces a radical sensibility we learned from listening to the blues, from listening to skin, to heat, and from listening to echoes, listening itself. The film was developed with the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow as a commission for the Glasgow International 2021. A newspaper was produced as part of the show with writing contributed by Nisha Ramayya.

Treble Heaven is an encounter between poetry and music by poet Nisha Ramayya and sonic dramaturg MJ Harding, exploring three ways of singing to heaven and three different types of longing. Treble Heaven is a ritual treating the damage of European and colonial cosmology and an experiment in collective gathering and releasing.

At the edge of a black hole, information is released.
Slice and glissando; drone and twinkle;
subjectivity dispersing and constellating in the forest.

 

Denise Ferreira da Silva is Professor and Director of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She is also a Visiting Professor at the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London.

James Goodwin is a poet undertaking a PhD in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London with a thesis on the blacksociopoetics of marronage, breath, sacrality and emanation. His pamphlet, aspects caught in the headspace we’re in: composition for friends, is forthcoming with Face Press. 

MJ Harding is a music producer and composer from London. 

Arjuna Neuman is an artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. He works with the essay form with a multiperspectival and mobile approach where ‘essay’ is an inherently future-oriented and experimental mode, becoming the guiding principle for research and production, which shifts between the bodily, haptic and affective through to the geopolitical, planetary and cosmological.

Nisha Ramayya grew up in Glasgow, and is now based in London. She is a poet and Lecturer in Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London. Her pamphlets include Notes on Sanskrit, Correspondences, and In Me the Juncture, as well as Threads, co-authored with Sandeep Parmar and Bhanu Kapil. States of the Body Produced by Love is her first full-length book, published by Ignota.

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