long time, lung time continuuuum!!! (a conver-something)

With Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Ventilated Pipe Progenies, Juno-6, Pamela Z.
Conceived by Simnikiwe Buhlungu and curated by Nele Kaczmarek.

Dear Pamela Z, 

I write this as fan-mail-with-an-impending-invitation. I’m currently working on a project which departs from engaging with breath/ventilation as a condition by which phenomena are able to resume/commence/pause/think. This exists within my overarching research in knowledge(s) productions and their appearances, sounds, languages and slippages. 

The project with the working title long time, lung time continuuuum!!! (a conver-something) is a response to IMAI—Inter Media Art Institute’s invitation to engage with their video archive in the particular space of KIT—Kunst im Tunnel’s underground tunnels in Düsseldorf, Germany. I am framing the project as a conver-something. Since 2017, I have been convening these kinds of public moments where the voices of people/places/contexts/histories translate into sonic and sensory experiences, while reading, thinking, humming and remembering together. 

Considering that I am a fan of your work (I included your song Echolocation in a radio show on synthesis, SRW radio, and have been reading and sharing your text A Tool is A Tool) it wasn’t long until the footage of the performance you did in 2014, BREATHING (Carbon Song Cycle) alongside Joan La Barbara piqued my interest. This particular work and its ability to inhale and exhale and stretch the sonic quality of breath is already in conversation with a video work from IMAI’s archive, Valie Export’s Breath Text: Love Poem (1970) that we would like to share. It stems from a series of multisensory video poems and invites the spectators to synchronize their breath with Valie Export, who is leaving traces of text-which-is-yet-to-happen on a sheet of glass. Joining these two possible voices will be the actual infrastructure of KIT that introduces, circulates, and expels air—read: ventilation. As the ventilation system must regrettably—yet understandably—continue working, it will be conjured underground through a quartet of metal piping, Ventilated Pipe Progenies (2006/24), which will huff and puff as a descendant of the space’s ventilation system at its own pace.

With a special interest in polyphonic synthesis as remnants of a “khuaya” (mundane gatherings, sharing gossip and secrets, asking for advice, Phuza Thursday/chillaz, hanging out on supermarket rooftops, etc.), I am further working on a new sound piece in collaboration with a Roland Juno-6 synthesizer. In exploring a multivalent approach in breathing through tools/ instruments used to produce auditory bookmarks, the Juno-6 has been invoked to share strategies of patching-as-remembering-as-writing-as-breathing that will hopefully resonate in KIT’s underground space.

I hope this fan-mail is somewhat interesting and you would like to join us in the weird underground space among other inhalations and exhalations, questions and potential answers.  

Many, many thanks.

Yours sincerely,

Simnikiwe