Breath of the Unborn
A durational performance exploring the loss of an unborn sibling and the silence surrounding it, using breath, ice, and embodied ritual to dissolve intergenerational trauma.
Breath of the Unborn is a two-day, three-hour durational performance that weaves together four interconnected works to explore intergenerational trauma, familial silence, and the fragile nature of life. The piece revisits an unspoken childhood memory, the miscarriage of an unborn sibling, and transforms it into a ritual of acknowledgement, mourning, and release.
The performance unfolds as a shifting embodiment between two roles: the artist as the unborn baby, navigating the emotional landscape of a family marked by unresolved loss, and the artist as herself, confronting the inherited silence that shaped her upbringing. Through breath, gesture, stillness, and intimate interaction with objects, she meditates on the ephemerality of life and the lingering absence that continues to shape the family’s emotional ecology.
A breath-activated mirror reveals and evaporates an ultrasound image of the unborn baby with each exhale, materializing memory only to let it disappear again. Family Portrait, a ten-page autobiographical comic reconstructs the hospital night through symbolic storytelling, where clocks, corridors, and animal figures render grief as suspended time. A fabricated mask echoes these forms, symbolizing both the emotional confinement within familial expectations and the internal barriers that silence difficult truths.
The final element, a molded 4 x 6 inch ice frame for the mirror, embodies the frozen state of unaddressed trauma. As the performance unfolds, the artist presses the ice against her body, accelerating its melting. The cold leaves temporary traces on the skin, marks of struggle, vulnerability, and release. The melting ice dissolves grief like tears, giving material form to the slow work of unfreezing what has long been held in silence.
The performance unfolds within a dark, red-lit environment, evoking the interiority of the womb and the emotional temperature of the memory being excavated. The soundscape consists of amplified heartbeats, blood flow, and amniotic fluid, immersing the audience in an intimate physiological atmosphere that blurs the boundary between the artist’s body and the remembered body of the unborn sibling.
Across each hour-long cycle, Breath of the Unborn becomes an intimate ritual of confrontation and transformation, inviting the audience to witness healing as an act of presence, dissolution, and emergence.