The project began in 2024 as a meditative photographic practice, exploring how the body carries memory in states of stillness. Rather than documenting movement, the camera became a witness to presence. The resulting images hold a quiet intimacy—bodies suspended in inward attention, shaped by breath rather than pose.

In 2025, the images shifted from screen to paper. Through extensive material testing, a light, fragile fibre paper was selected—thin enough to crease, absorb and register touch. The photographs became surfaces of memory, echoing the softly exposed sensorial quality of the body itself.

Printed at small scale, they require viewers to come close, pause, and align their breath with the image. Suspended on a folding screen, the photographs appear to float. The screen functions as a balcony: a threshold that shelters, filters, reveals and conceals.

A hand-stitched photobook housed in a wooden box further extends this material vocabulary, memory that may be held, opened, returned to. The materials are not neutral carriers; they act as collaborators, shaping the emotional architecture of the work.

The performance emerged from the material logic of the installation and the balcony’s threshold condition. Rehearsals began with breath awareness, where Sousami worked through subtle shifts of weight, leaning, folding, and unfolding. Movement developed as a slow arc:

The body does not express emotion; emotion surfaces and recedes from within. A soft exhale, a collapse, and the act of rising again reveal a quiet resilience held inside vulnerability.

Live sound by Christopher Rodriguez emerges as shared breath. Rather than accompanying movement, it grows with it, deepening and dispersing, until both return to quiet. In this shared rhythm, body, sound, and space become one continuous presence.

The performance took place in a former railway waiting room at Peckham Rye Station in London, whose spatial and historical conditions actively shaped the work. Rather than functioning as a neutral backdrop, the site operated as an active spatial collaborator. Its weathered walls, open resonance, and the steady rhythm of passing trains became part of the performance’s sonic and temporal field.

The site exists in a suspended state, held between abandonment and reuse, past and present. This architectural condition echoed the performance’s own movement between vulnerability and intensity, stillness and emergence. As the body moved and sound travelled through the space, the trains outside folded into the composition, situating the work within a continuum of time and memory.

Once a place of pause between departure and arrival, the waiting room carries an architectural memory of transition. Like a balcony, it occupies an in-between condition, neither inside nor outside, held between what has not yet begun and what is just about to unfold. Within this spatial resonance, the work took shape as body, image, architecture, and breath listened to one another, coexisting and transforming through shared presence.

The audience’s responses revealed how both the materials and the performance carried emotional resonance. Some viewers leaned in closely to observe the delicate textures of the paper, lighting the images gently with their phones. One shared that his father would have loved the photographs for their quiet nostalgia and attentive detail. In these exchanges, the installation bridged personal memory with shared resonance, allowing fragility to become a point of connection.

During the live performance, several viewers described feeling a subtle shift in the room from the moment Sousami entered the space. The beginning was almost imperceptible, as if movement arose from the space itself rather than being introduced to it. Breath and gesture gradually accumulated, and some audience members noted a moment when their own emotional rhythm seemed to align with the performer’s. This was not a dramatic climax but a gentle attunement in which presence became shared rather than observed.

Within these durations of watching and listening, body, material, and audience attention formed a shared field of presence. Fragility became relational.

Concept, Direction, Installation & Choreography : Siyuan Meng

Performer: Azize Sousami

Live Sound / Composition: Christopher Rodriguez