Nikos Navridis

b. 1958, Greece

BREATHS, OR SHE WHO TIES KNOTS

All spaces are asphyxiatingly full. The house on Pery Square in Limerick is totally empty, just as anything that fills with air is empty. The empty house is, in its own way, complete. In other words, asphyxiatingly full. All spaces are asphyxiatingly full by our breath. In Looking for a Place, my people move around their breath until they reach, in their own way, their own space. And they eventually do so.

A charming development. An obsession. To reach from the window to the door, I had to go past thousands of breaths, and slowly this started to present difficulties for me when each time I had to move over a certain distance. This began in public spaces, but after a while I understood that it did not have to do with the peculiarities of the space but with space itself, its very existence. (As such, I comprehended that the difference between public and private is in the way in which one is transferred through them, how one moves from the window to the door.)

Our spaces are full of breaths, full of this living liquid. Our breaths are the experiences of her world, diffused sensuality that may provoke or cover everything. (My people in Looking for a Place found movement difficult, I believe, because of the lack of this diffusion, because the models, balloons, heads hindered them from following their breaths.) I wanted to do something with this. I needed, at the same time, a ‘full’ space so that I could find these possibilities within. The small room, with the fireplace and the curved entrance, makes you feel that you are sliding into it. The rooms in these old Victorian houses were almost always covered with wallpaper. I thought about restoring this room. I want to fill the interior space of this room with latex mouthpieces. I want to trap the breaths and to show what could have taken place in that room – in other words, what currently takes place in our rooms. Our rooms are spaces totally filled by our breaths.

At this time, blowing up a balloon has become, for me, a brave decision. Out breaths give birth to everything. When entering this room, I want everybody to think about this and to do it, so that they can see.

(Text: friends + neighbours catalogue, 2000)