Exercises in Empathy: Respiração / Breathing

In its version at PUC-Rio’s Solar, the decision was made to explore the connections between empathy and breathing. We divided the exhibition space into three distinct modulations of breath. In the basement, the release of the breath; on the ground floor, the search for a restorative cadence in dark times; and, on the first floor, the urgency of resisting the forces that seek to prevent us from making the chest a communal tide. Sighing, breathing and conspiring are constitutive elements of the poetics that inhabit the galleries. All the artists and works brought together here, despite their cultural and generational differences, share the same desire to imagine heterogeneous ways of feeling and living. We are invited to make empathy an exercise in love for the world and in indignation at injustice.