From Pell's website: "Pell performs wearing a prototype Surface-Supplied Breathing Apparatus SSBA dubbed an “Oyster” diving helmet filled with 30lt of saline. Air is drawn from the surface via an umbilical. The sinuses are flooded. Controlled epiglottal function prevents drowning. The performance continues under commercial diver supervision and protocols exploring fields of consciousness and pneumatoses for 111minutes."
"Hydrophilia revealed the art of courting danger by confronting the body to act in unnatural ways. It concentrated the techne diving and of faith. The spectator was implicated in threat or promise of asphyxiation and their sadistic, innocent pleasure, was either diverted or compounded by the rhythmical, meditative and metronome-quality breathing soundtrack that accompanies the performance and provides an immersive and soothing fabric to the work. There was a kind of pathos in the vision and the limited action that I could perform whilst wearing the headpiece so the diver | ocean | aquanaut had to be re/member/ed or imagined. The most memorable feedback came from a nine-year-old friend Casey. His mother asked him what he thought the performance was about and he replied, "Sarah was dreaming." Casey was right. It was a space for dreaming. (Another child reported seeing imaginary sharks and sat on the floor to play with them too so I guess the notion of the ocean translated in more ways than I imagined.) The poetics of this piece allowed for an analogue, simulation and a real space to coexist. The long duration and the slow breathing stretched and slowed down perceived measures of time between inhalations and exhalations. It brought about an ocean-time or desert-time, and, as Baudrillard might say, there became ‘the silence of the image’. If I was right, we all shared our territories and experiences through pneumatoses."
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Sarah Jane Pell- Hydrophilia, 2004
From Pell's website:
"Pell performs wearing a prototype Surface-Supplied Breathing Apparatus SSBA dubbed an “Oyster” diving helmet filled with 30lt of saline. Air is drawn from the surface via an umbilical. The sinuses are flooded. Controlled epiglottal function prevents drowning. The performance continues under commercial diver supervision and protocols exploring fields of consciousness and pneumatoses for 111minutes."
"Hydrophilia revealed the art of courting danger by confronting the body to act in unnatural ways. It concentrated the techne diving and of faith. The spectator was implicated in threat or promise of asphyxiation and their sadistic, innocent pleasure, was either diverted or compounded by the rhythmical, meditative and metronome-quality breathing soundtrack that accompanies the performance and provides an immersive and soothing fabric to the work. There was a kind of pathos in the vision and the limited action that I could perform whilst wearing the headpiece so the diver | ocean | aquanaut had to be re/member/ed or imagined. The most memorable feedback came from a nine-year-old friend Casey. His mother asked him what he thought the performance was about and he replied, "Sarah was dreaming." Casey was right. It was a space for dreaming. (Another child reported seeing imaginary sharks and sat on the floor to play with them too so I guess the notion of the ocean translated in more ways than I imagined.) The poetics of this piece allowed for an analogue, simulation and a real space to coexist. The long duration and the slow breathing stretched and slowed down perceived measures of time between inhalations and exhalations. It brought about an ocean-time or desert-time, and, as Baudrillard might say, there became ‘the silence of the image’. If I was right, we all shared our territories and experiences through pneumatoses."
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