Julieanna Preston. Pleural Space; Taking-breath again, again, again {book chapter]. Embodied Awareness and Space: Body, Agency and Current Practice, Ed. Christos Kakalis and David Boyd, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. (forthcoming)

In anatomy, pleural space aids optimal functioning of the lungs during breathing. It is considered a potential space— a space between two adjacent structures likened to an empty plastic bag that has not been opened; two walls, no interior volume, until inflated. Pleural space is dynamic and made more so by a fluid that acts as a lubricant towards effortless and continuous movement. That is, until it doesn’t.

Breath-taking was a site-situated sound art installation exhibited at Mussikens Huis, Aalborg, Denmark as part of RE:SOUND, the 8th International Conference for Histories of Media Arts 2019. It consisted of a four-hour looped soundscape heard through headphones while sitting in a soft chair looking out over the Scandinavian landscape and reading a small booklet.

The soundscape iterated a short analytical text cobbled from medical texts on the physiological phases in a dying person’s breathing. Each iteration was resounded through successive and accumulative acts of cutting out the liminal hiatus between an inhale and an exhale, while at the same time, performing the characteristics of that phase of respiration. Here, pleural space is extended between the heart, lungs and ears in sound that pans, triggers and amplifies emotive expression only relatable through embodied experience.

The booklet contextualised the making of this soundscape including coincidence with other sound works and theoretical discourse. Written in a personal and intimate voice, one body to the next, it reinvested in pleural space more prosaically with those two close surfaces moving against and because of the other. The experience of listening to the soundscape is both softened, agitated and enhanced when reading the booklet.

This book chapter critically reflects and re-presents this work as a potential space, another pleural space.

To view this work: http://www.julieannapreston.space/#/breathtaking-2019/