A performance that transforms breath into a poetic act: an expanded space in which to lose control, listen to the voice, and inhabit an environment in constant construction—between body, sound, and meditation.

What moves breath between things: that through-breathing, that narrow opening between taking and giving, between stealing fragments of the world and releasing breath back into a world in pieces?
With Breathing Room, Salvo Lombardo leans into breath, approaching it as a poetic act. The work primarily consists in the invention of an ideal, expanded space in which to “catch one’s breath” and to practice the loss of the artist’s control over the artistic act itself.

The dramaturgy—drawing inspiration from Il silenzio è cosa viva by Chandra Livia Candiani—is shaped by a series of prompts and suggestions that Salvo Lombardo has received over time as gifts from different people, colleagues, and friends. These contributions help train breath as a substance of meaning and as an open field of signification.

Conceived as an environment in constant construction, Breathing Room is a performance grounded in voice as well as in the body: a room, an ideal perimeter of relationship, informed by a voice that projects speech and evokes action—somewhere between oral meditation, guided practice, environmental sound installation, and performative podcast.

Each activation of this “breathing apparatus” constitutes a unique, non-reproducible event. It is based on an invitation to an artist from the field of dance and performance to inhabit this relational perimeter together with the audience, through the activation of a performance determined in real time—without rehearsals, previews, or future repetitions—made possible by the combination of suggestions from the ambient voice and those the performer receives through headphones, deciding how and whether to act upon them.

In this way, the invitation becomes an act of complicity as well as a radical expression of being-now, and an opportunity to question—through breathing—the principles of authority and individual power that underpin the art production system. An invitation to be carried along, an attitude of listening, an exercise in vulnerability and relationality that can suggest an act of mutual care.

Breathing Room is part of an ongoing reflection on “care” developed together with Lavanderia a Vapore in Collegno, where Salvo Lombardo is an associated artist.

Concept, texts, voice, and environment: Salvo Lombardo
Dramaturgy inspired by Il silenzio è cosa viva by Chandra Livia Candiani
Words offered as a gift by Fabio Acca, Michele Di Stefano, Carlo Lei, Cristina Kristal Rizzo, Alessandro Sciarroni, Alessandro Tollari
Featuring (in alphabetical order): Philippe Barbut, Marta Ciappina, Marco D’Agostin, Nicola Galli, Silvia Gribaudi, Matteo Marchesi, Francesca Pennini, Cristina Kristal Rizzo, Irene Russolillo
Sound design: Fabrizio Alviti
Musical quotations from Ira by Iosonouncane

Production: Chiasma
With the support of Lavanderia a Vapore (Collegno)
With the contribution of MIC – Ministry of Culture