December Chronicle by Liam Warren, Ratri Notosudirdjo & Fagner Lima

The inaugural meeting of the 2024-2025 COOP study group, An Invitation to Action – A Basis for Hope, was held at Nida Art Colony, situated between the Baltic Sea and the Curonian Lagoon, as part of the DAI (Dutch Art Institute) roaming itinerant program. Facilitated by SAVVY Contemporary, an organization dedicated to fostering critical discourse and cultural pluralism, the gathering brought together participants from Greece, China, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Italy, Nigeria, and Cameroon, united in their exploration of art’s role in anti-imperialism and resistance.

The meeting focused on creating space for participants to meet one another. The group engaged in collective walks, exercises, games, and creations, all within a framework of slow reading and collaborative discussion. These discussions were informed by texts such as Ground Provisions by Harney and Thompson, and Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. Conversations focused on solidarity, artistic militancy, and the intersection of art and political action, drawing on the legacies of movements like the Medu Art Ensemble, while reflecting on the role of cultural workers in anti-colonial struggles and examining how these histories continue to influence contemporary artistic practices.

Words guiding the study group's trajectory included:

● Breath
● Ensemble
● Community
● Plea
● Sincerity
● Tools

Although the group met for the first time, a sense of solidarity and sincerity quickly emerged. The next COOP meeting will take place from January 14-17, 2024, at Nida Art Colony.

Muyang Poem

Now you have touched the women

You have raided art rooms

You have burned our prints black

You have scattered files wide

You have crushed meeting halls

You have locked theater doors

You have marked safe houses

You have watched train stops

You have hunted dancers down

You have traced our footprints

You have banned street songs

You have shot youth in squares

You have stripped our words bare

You have searched mine shafts

You have feared night whispers

You have touched what flows

We have printed in dark

We have danced toyi-toyi

We have taught in fields

We have sung in camps

We have moved through towns

We have painted at dawn

We have built in shadows

We have spread through cracks

We have filled dead spaces

We have flowed like rain

they raid    we create

they burn    we spread

they ban     we flow

they hunt    we move

they end     we begin

we are water

we keep flowing

Review of Tara White’s “Pneumatic Polyphony: How Do We Practice Breathwork When Dealing with Asphyxia” by Liam Warren

Tara White’s Pneumatic Polyphony is a masterful, layered performance exploring anxiety, breath, and systemic oppression. Performed with just a desk and a projection screen, White weaves humor, personal narrative, and archival material into a poignant critique of how we navigate suffocating structures, both literal and figurative.

The performance opens with an unexpected acknowledgment of unease: “not expecting to be presenting a kitchen at the first confluence.” This self-referential quip sets the tone, situating the work within a paradoxical space of vulnerability and command. The backdrop—“HOW TO DO THINGS WITH ANXIETY,” a sardonic nod to the theoretical framework How to Do Things with Theory—grounds the piece in both critique and lived experience.

White’s deconstruction of an NHS-issued booklet for managing anxiety becomes a linchpin for the performance’s critique of institutionalized coping mechanisms. The absurd suggestions—juggling with socks, ripping paper into pieces and cleaning it up, throwing socks against a wall—underscore the trivialization of mental health within bureaucratic frameworks. This comedic dissection moves into the harrowing recounting of White’s great-grandfather’s death, a tragedy muddled with systemic neglect.

The archival material, steeped in the language of industrial indifference, juxtaposes the personal and the political. Headlines like “DAGENHAM MAN CRUSHED IN MYSTERY DOCK TRAGEDY” and details of cost-saving negligence by the Port of London Authority evoke a chilling resonance with the themes of time, labor, and structural violence. The “lift” becomes both a literal and metaphorical vessel—a lung-like container embodying breath, elevation, entrapment, and ultimately, trauma.

White’s reflection on the lift as a liminal space—a site where time, space, and anxiety coalesce—is particularly striking. As a video of someone trapped in an elevator appears, apparently a result of Tara’s doom scrolling on YouTube, becomes a microcosm of modernity’s claustrophobic rhythms. The lift, a mechanical entity designed to facilitate upward mobility, transforms into a site of existential dread, amplifying the tension between functionality and failure.
Time becomes a recurring motif throughout the piece, interrogated from multiple angles. Mentally, through the obsessive repetitive thoughts and cycles of anxiety; physically, in the crushing mechanics of the faulty lift; socially, as a collective waiting game; politically, through bureaucratic indifference; and economically, where productivity is prioritized over human safety.

Tara White’s Pneumatic Polyphony begins as a formal, almost academic conference, only to transform into something entirely different. The performance culminates in a startling moment: voices and bodies from the audience erupt into a cacophony of breath, screams, and gasps. This polyphonic outburst evokes Franco Berardi’s Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, where breathing is positioned as both an existential and collective act. In this visceral expression, the performance renders the invisible mechanics of breath—so often overlooked—immediate and undeniable. This sonic chaos mirrors the systemic pressures that choke individual agency under neoliberalism, echoing Berardi’s critique of how economic and social systems asphyxiate life itself. White recontextualizes the wartime slogan Keep Calm and Carry On, exposing its haunting resonance in a post-2008 world of austerity and unrelenting crisis. Their iterative reading—“and on, and on, and on…”—becomes a bitter chant, a critique of how neoliberalism repackages endurance as virtue while perpetuating cycles of exhaustion and despair.

With its blend of humor, heartbreak, and critique, Pneumatic Polyphony captures the entangled forces of anxiety, labor, and survival. White transforms the ordinary act of breathing into a poetic and defiant resistance against a world that often seems designed to asphyxiate. The performance lingers, challenging us to consider how we, too, might breathe through the weight of it all.

Michel Foucault preface of Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattar

With what I read to the group here:

This art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already

present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential

principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this

great book into a manual or guide to everyday life:

• Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.

• Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposi-

tion, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal

hierarchiza-tion.

• Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law,

limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held

sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is

positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities,

mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is

not sedentary but nomadic.

• Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even

though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of

desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that

possesses revolutionary force.

• Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor

political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use

political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier

of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.

• Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the

individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product

of power. What is needed is to "de-individualize" by means of multipli-

cation and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be

the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant genera-

tor of de-individualization.

• Do not become enamored of power.

Michel Foucault preface of Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattar