During an artistic residency in a mountainous region of Portugal, as a part of my research on voice and listening, I met the abandoned mines of "Cabeço do Pião". From that experience, different types of toxic vestiges remained circulating in my body: from particles of contaminated dust in my throat, to the silenced and unrepaired stories of exploited workers, and also, the monoculture of the compulsory heterosexual system.

Starting from this affect connected with the interest of lesbian forms of knowledge I develop a performative practice that takes the gesture of breathing in its regenerative, transformative and hallucinatory capacity, in a context of polluted skies and strange smells. I investigate the matter of air as an invisible and living interface, which creates unexpected circulations and mixtures between human beings and more than human beings. Together with the performers Emily da Silva and Bibi Dória, with whom I work in collaboration in Lisbon, we conspire fictions of a community of lovers connected through the air and collective rhythms of breathing. I seek the exercise of co-imagining vitality and eroticism through deviant listening to the breath, experiencing vaporous, hyperventilating and circulating forces.

Concept and performance: Alina Ruiz Folini
Creation in Portugal: Alina Ruiz Folini, Emily da Silva, Bibi Dória.
Video: Patricia Black.
Collaboration in Amsterdam: Juli Frodermann (sound) and Isis Andreatta (performance).
Mentor: Rita Natàlio.  
With the support of Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Scholarship  (Portugal) and Terra Batida (Portugal). 
Residencies: Estúdios Victor Córdon (Lisbon), Estúdio Parasita (Lisbon), Piscina (Lisbon), Materiais Diversos / Grand Studio (Brussels).