Archive of Exhales is the culmination of a 4 year project. In its physical form it is 1000 photographs of 2000 collected clay pipes, boiled and cleaned, these clay cylinders hanging from 2000 fishing wires of varying lengths to create a gentle wave, each pipe producing 16,000 seconds /over 4 hours of recorded sonorous exhales, composed into 3480 seconds / 58 minutes of music, printed on 1000 sheets of vellum, captioned with 1000 length measurements,1000 diameter measurements, and 1000 hole diameter measurements to the quarter millimetre, carefully packed away in 2 archive boxes and two annotated books of hand written notes about my historical findings.

Behind these numbers and repetitions are 2000 people, ordinary people lost to history, whose last interaction with each of these 2000 clay pipes was to inhale through and discard them. In memory of every breath and to seek connection with every person, I have completed the breath cycle with an exhalation. These exhalations form Sonorous Bones, a piece composed to mimic rhythms of a murmuration.

Documentation: Alicja Kielan, with cover image by Wojciech Chrubasik, courtesy of Galerie Op Enheim