bless our breath
W/ GAS GALLERY
bless our breath is a deck of playing cards that facilitate conversation, reflection, and creative process around breath, as both a theme and a practice organized in collaboration with gas. bless our breath is a deck of playing cards that facilitate conversation, reflection, and creative process around breath, as both a theme and a practice. Working with breath as an intimate medium for connection with ourselves, our communities, our ancestors, and the futures of our worlds, this deck of cards guides card-players through a range of ideas, questions, and prompts. The project honors the symbolic and practical implications of breath within this cultural and political moment of uprising and rupture: the intersections of the movement for Black liberation, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impacts of climate change resulting in mass wildfires and polluted air. While holding space for aggregated legacies of grief, the cards aim to build critically intimate, compassionate, honest, and resilient relationships with one’s self and others.
The set of cards can be used as a facilitation medium in a multiplicity of experimental ways to be defined by card players. The deck is divided into two series of cards: Building Blocks and Ascending Blocks. Building Blocks invite card-players to reflect on specific themes such as “Interdependence”, “Reciprocity”, and “Grief” as they relate to the futures of our worlds. Building Blocks provide anchors for reflecting on collective futures and possibilities, as well as ancestors, histories, and challenges. Ascending Blocks open up a space and project a destination. They create a path to breathe life into, directly inviting conversation, collective processing, and community-minded practice. They include questions such as, “How do we feel the earth breathe?”, “We are already ancestors. What are we laying the groundwork for?”, and “What does liberation feel like?”.
