I. Origins: The Still Body and the Image

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.

Figure 1
Figure 1

*Balcony Whispers*, meditative photography, 2024. Photograph © Siyuan Meng.

II. Material Fragility as Method

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.

Figure 2
Figure 2

*Balcony Whispers*, photographic print on fragile fibre paper, 2025. Photograph © Siyuan Meng.

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.

Figure 3
Figure 3

*Balcony Whispers*, folding-screen installation with small-scale photographic prints on fibre paper, 2025. Photograph © Siyuan Meng.

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.

Figure 4
Figure 4

*Balcony Whispers*, hand-stitched photobook housed in a wooden box, 2025. Photograph © Siyuan Meng.

III. Performance as a Ritual of Presence

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:

stillness → shelter → desire → swell → return

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.

Figure 5
Figure 5

*Balcony Whispers*, live performance still, 2025. Photograph © Siyuan Meng.

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.

Figure 6
Figure 6

*Balcony Whispers*, sound artist performing live sound in dialogue with the performer, 2025. Photograph © Siyuan Meng.

IV. Site Conditions and Spatial Resonance

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.

Figure 7
Figure 7

*Balcony Whispers*, live performance still, 2025. Photograph. © Siyuan Meng.

V.Audience Encounter

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.

Figure 8
Figure 8

*Balcony Whispers*, exhibition view, 2025. Photograph © Siyuan Meng.

Production Team

Concept, Direction, Installation & Choreography : Siyuan Meng

Performer: Azize Sousami

Live Sound / Composition: Christopher Rodriguez

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

Author Biography

Siyuan Meng is an independent dance filmmaker, performer and choreographer working across screendance, ritual performance and sensory installation. Her practice weaves embodied memory, material poetics and diasporic presence into site-responsive choreographies of stillness and shared resonance. Rooted in East Asian philosophical sensibilities and informed by her movement between China and London, Meng approaches the moving body as both medium and archive, where memory, displacement and ritual are held and reconfigured. Her work explores how embodied awareness can generate spaces of intimacy, collective presence and repair through attentive movement and material fragility. By integrating screendance, somatic practice and ritual gesture, she develops poetic choreographic frameworks that invite stillness in motion and presence in absence.

Meng holds an MA in Screendance from London Contemporary Dance School.