With Unison, as a Matter of Fact (trust & confusion), the choreographer Alice Chauchat (b. 1977, France; lives in Berlin) presents a score that draws attention to an activity shared by all living things: breathing. Working with movement, perception, attention, and their interwoven choreographic potential, Chauchat invites the visitor to tune into one’s breath and the collective breathing in the space.

The task, written down on a card and passed to the visitor by a docent, contains a formula that, when activated, reveals an incessant choir of breaths. Written like an aphorism, the text and the attentive practice it suggests renders palpable and perceptible a layer of movement commonly unnoticed or over-looked. By way of practice, focus, and dedication, a previously unconscious choreography unfolds. As such, Unison, as a Matter of Fact (trust & confusion) evolves and becomes visible and tangible as a conscious doing and activity. A renewed awareness of what is individual and what is shared leads to a microscopics of presence and being in relation: how an inhale expands and an exhale contracts the thorax, how rhythms congregate and differ, how my breathing affects yours, how flows of oxygen and carbon dioxide dance in space, and how they move into, through, and out of different bodies. As one explores the fluctuating relationship between one’s movements and those of others, sameness comes and goes, and synchronicity is attained and undone. At a moment of shared attention and embodiment, breathing is revealed as a wondrous multiplicity of movement, event, and action that, in their differences, falls in and out of unison, towards a common breath.

Tom Engels, exhibition catalogue for the exhibition trust & confusion (2021) curated by Xue Tan and Raimundas Malašauskas