"Only Breath" seeks to transcend the contemporary context, venturing beyond the constructs of nationality, gender, or age that often shape our frontiers. Instead, I aim to focus on the universal constants, those elemental threads that connect us as humans.
Identity's Imagined Borders
Identity, the very core of our individual and collective self, has become a pressing matter in today's age more than ever. As societies grow more diverse and complex, the very idea of identity is expanding and transforming, precipitating conversations, debates, and conflicts around the world. The postmodern self is decentered, recognizing identity as contingent and constructed rather than innate.
The categories of gender, nationality, or ethnicity are not intrinsic essences but rather constructed through social discourse and norms. Our identities and notions of self are shaped in large part by the labels, categories and social constructs of the culture we are born into.
The identities we inhabit take form through processes of difference, by demarcating Self and Other. As cultural theorist Stuart Hall explained, "Identities are constructed through, not outside, difference". In a world rife with divisions, we live in a society of tribalism, where we define our in-group largely in opposition to the out-group — the “other”, or the “foreigner”.
The word's “foreigner” etymological root is the Old French forain or forein, meaning "outside, external or remote". These derived from the Latin foras, indicating the exterior space beyond thresholds, outside the gates of the city. The term foreigner denotes someone seen as an outsider to a particular community, an "other" from beyond familiar territories and identities.
The Cultural Constructs of Language and the Making of the Foreigner
Language expresses cultural meaning while also shaping cultural knowledge and experience. Our linguistic worlds are saturated with cultural assumptions and significances that influence how we view and engage with the world around us.
Philosophers like Michel Foucault have examined the relationship between language and power in society and culture. He saw language as a crucial site of power and social control. Dominant discourses transmitted through language create disciplined subjects that internalize societal constraints. Hence language is fundamental to processes of normalization that shape cultural knowledge and identities in ways that maintain hierarchical power relations.
Foucault's insights can be directly related to the concept of the "foreigner" and how language and discourse contribute to the cultural construction of foreignness. Specifically, the language used to describe foreigners, immigrants, and cultural others plays a key role in establishing power dynamics and systems of social control. Terms like "alien," "exotic," "outsider," or "foreigner" discursively establish a conceptual division between those who belong and those who are external to a particular cultural group. This language reinforces the idea that there are distinct cultural norms and spaces that foreigners or outsiders threaten. It justifies surveillance of those deemed culturally other and promotes assimilation into dominant cultural values and practices. Discourse around foreignness also frequently involves racialized, gendered, or Orientalist stereotypes that marginalize and exert power over minority groups.Postcolonial theorist Edward Said examined how imperialist societies projected foreignness onto colonized peoples, marking them as perpetual outsiders to justify exploitation. Foreignness became codified as racial inferiority.
“Only Breath” highlights the ubiquity of otherness and multiculturalism in contemporary societies. It inspires us to confront the boundaries and divisions that estrange us from each other in the name of constructed differences. Artificial barriers between people can be dismantled. The participatory installation proposed resonates with that subject by presenting a ritual space where our shared breath as a universal force, renders notions of the foreigner arbitrary.
Breathing as One: the ritual of our shared human essence
Visitors will enter a dimmed room one by one, pick up a deflated balloon, and blow air into it until fully inflated. The room will progressively fill with these balloons, and as time passes by, they will start deflating at different degrees, creating in the whole an organic, moving, live entity, remembering a “collective lung”. As the balloon leaks air, this worn breath returns to the closed room, ready to be inhaled by the next visitor, enhancing permeability and exchange. The steady communal filling of the space symbolizes building bonds beyond constructed barriers, as participants silently take part in a contemplative ritual of breathwork.
Anthropologists like Victor Turner have studied rituals across cultures, identifying how they create liminal spaces and experiences that temporarily erase society’s divisions and categories. This installation provides such a ritual context for shedding the heaviness of our constructed identities to rediscover our natural state, foregrounding our universal need for breath.
At the most basic biological level, our shared physiological need for air inextricably connects all human life. Our lungs, pumping ceaselessly from first cry to last sigh, reveal our creaturely kinship beneath acquired identities built of language and culture. Air is what we all have in common, what we all share, what we all need to live. It is the invisible that sustains us, the ungraspable that connects us.
When we exhale our breath, we are engaging in an act of com-union, finding the universals that transcend culturally-prescribed differences. It evokes Turner’s notion of “communitas” — an unstructured community of equal individuals sharing common experiences.
Breath precedes belief, in a process far older than borders. We are bound by breathing before any doctrine can divide us. We inhale and exhale in unison, bound by this cycling of air long before we learn to speak of “them” and “us.”
Art critic John Berger wrote, “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak”. This artwork takes us back to that pre-verbal recognition, before we learned to divide and label one another.
Final words
In a world where we often focus on the divisions and the boundaries, I invite visitors to participate in this installation which constitutes a tribute to our shared human experience. To redefine who constitutes “us”, based not on ethnicity, nationality, gender, or creed but on our elemental human bond. A space where we can celebrate our unique identity, not just in contrast to our diversities, but in our shared humanity, our shared essence.
Our culture’s categories are revealed as artifice when we focus on this common thread that weaves through our bodies. Let us rebuild ourselves around what unites rather than divides through this ritualistic performance that embodies the collective lungs.
The Poetic Impulse: Rumi's "Only Breath"
The inspiration for this installation's title "Only Breath" is drawn from the renowned 13th century Sufi mystic poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi and specifically his poem of the same name. In "Only Breath," Rumi articulates a universalist vision that moves beyond surface-level constructs of identity such as nationality, culture, gender or religious affiliation. He points to a shared essence binding all: the breath that animates mortal flesh before labels and names divide and delimit.
This poetic conception of breath as a core animating force resonates strongly with the installation’s conception of breathing as a ritual act expressing our common essence. As participants collectively inhale and exhale, identities fall away and a shared rhythm emerges, reflecting Rumi’s verse made flesh.
Poetry's power is such that it can distill truths that lie beyond time and particulars. Rumi's message still speaks today, an invitation to blow down the walls between us and find resonance in shared practice.
Born in 1207 CE in the Persian empire, Rumi’s influence flourished through poetry composed in Persian and Arabic that conveyed Sufi mysticism in vivid symbolic language. Often using the metaphor of intoxicated or divine love, his works sought unity of religious beliefs while expressing an inward, ecstatic devotional spirit.
The expansive universal vision of “Only Breath” exemplifies Rumi’s humanism and ability to articulate transcendent truths.
