Breathing Space is a new sound installation for the National Museum of Australia’s Garden of Australian Dreams. Inspired by texts by Waanyi writer Alexis Wright, it’s an oasis of quiet reverberations, revealing the calls, tremulations and deep stirrings of Country.
Areas in the garden softly pulse with human and other-than-human sounds, emanating from speakers embedded in paths and walls. In the garden’s central field, all the vibrations converge and disperse in undulating drifts of sound.
Breathing Space is a sonic re-wilding, planting the garden with choruses of frogs and cicadas, subterranean rumbles, the mysterious internal acoustic world of trees, whispered voices, and ethereal instrumental and vocal phrases, layered and abstracted into patterns to be heard in passing and pausing.
Breathing Space will be located on Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri country at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. We can’t wait to share it with you — stay tuned for announcements on this for 2023.