CCA Glasgow and Ignota hosted Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva for a screening of and discussion about their new film Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum with James Goodwin. Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum was subsequently accompanied by a performance of Treble Heaven by Nisha Ramayya and MJ Harding both of which are available here.

Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum by artist Arjuna Neuman and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva continues their interest in reimagining knowledge and existence without the limits of European and Colonial constructions of the human. To speculate how to exist otherwise as humans in the world, they traverse from quantum mechanics to polyrhythms, from Tarkovsky to Hype Williams, from heat to Anaximander.

Following the element of earth through its many facets, groundings, afterlifes and forms, Soot Breath scales between the historical/cultural, the organic, the quantum and the cosmic. Gathering a variety of examples where subjectivity is unbound from the mind alone, but rebound to the world, Soot Breath examines how structures of power break material ties to other humans, more-than-humans and deeper implicated bonds with our planet and beyond.

Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum is a film dedicated to tenderness. It reproduces a radical sensibility we learned from listening to the blues, from listening to skin, to heat, and from listening to echoes, listening itself. The film was developed with the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow as a commission for the Glasgow International 2021. A newspaper was produced as part of the show with writing contributed by Nisha Ramayya.

Treble Heaven is an encounter between poetry and music by poet Nisha Ramayya and sonic dramaturg MJ Harding, exploring three ways of singing to heaven and three different types of longing. Treble Heaven is a ritual treating the damage of European and colonial cosmology and an experiment in collective gathering and releasing.

At the edge of a black hole, information is released.
Slice and glissando; drone and twinkle;
subjectivity dispersing and constellating in the forest.

This event was in collaboration with and performed live at Cafe OTO (London) in conjunction with Ignota Books and originally live-streamed for online viewing on CCA Annex. An archive room featuring a large body of research for Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum including interviews, audio transcripts, mixtapes, essays and imagery is also available.

The event was live captioned throughout with closed captions subsequently added to the recordings of both the performance of Treble Heaven and the subsequent discussion.