Holding Breath: Collective Listening, Care and Connection in the wake of Pandemic Grief

In this session Postdoctoral researcher Poppy will talk about their current project-in-development, Holding Breath which explores collective listening, care and connection in the wake of pandemic grief (and beyond) through a series of intimate, generative and reciprocal encounters through the sharing of voice-note memos.  The project will work co-creatively with women and non-binary people who experience debilitating or persistent breathlessness across unevenly shared and felt thresholds of experience. The project foregrounds slow, attentive and reciprocal listening and works from my own lived experience of living with/in discomfort, debility and breathlessness.  In this session, I will talk about the initial prompts and inspirations for the project, ethical and methodological questions, growing a distributed network of care and solidarity, and more.  It is an ‘experiment in listening’ (Shah, 2021), and perhaps a creative sound project, but I'm also thinking of it as an embodied archival project.  A short example of voice-note exchanges will be shared from the Creative Development and testing stage, after which I will encourage listening-oriented responses from the audience.