The Cloister

Serena and Anna, two of the students who are helping make this project happen, sent me some photos today of the space we will be using. It's a beautiful mediaeval cloister now part of the university.

We are thinking and emailing each other about what we need to prepare the space. It's quite big, and at first rather daunting as we don't have a huge budget and there is very little time.

But I am reminding myself that this project is not about 'doing' and 'things' and 'stuff'. And really we are returning this space to something very close to its original purpose. The architecture was designed to enclose a sheltered space, for peace and contemplation.

Visually it has this beautiful rhythm of the portico going around it, which is quite wide, with flagstone floor. There are three incredibly tall narrow trees like exclamation marks!!! They go quite beyond the frame of this shot and reach right up into the sky. And the little sapling just coming into leaf. And there is this square of bright green grass. So we are thinking about how to work with this.

Mindfulness of Breathing

The Mindfulness of Breathing is a very simple and profound meditation, practiced in many spiritual traditions. It is simply becoming aware of the breath as it moves in and out of our body. From the moment we are born to the moment of death we are in constant exchange with our world.

Working in collaboration with students in Girona, a meditation space will be set up in the cloister of San Domenec. We would like to invite the people of Girona participate in this project. Our hope is to create, for the week of the exhibition, a peaceful space into which people may come and sit. We hope that guided meditations will be run by local Buddhist and Yoga centres, and other local groups. Visitors will be invited to enter this space and spend a little time quietly observing the breath, and contemplating how they might bring their lives more into ‘natural balance’.

A record will be kept of the number of participants and length of breathing, which, at an average of 0.72g per person per minute, will be added up at the end of the exhibition.

Any remaining CO2 from the ‘Year of Breathing’ will be donated to the people of Girona for the purposes of meditation, jogging, singing, blowing up balloons, laughing or sex.

Thanks to Elisa Brandi for the photo of San Domenech Cloister - sorry you got locked out of your flat in the process!