In April 2019, the Borough Road Gallery hosted Breathing in the Borough Road Archive, an unusual and quietly radical experiment in art appreciation by CCC. For three days, visitors were invited to encounter the Gallery’s holdings not through the traditional modes of vision and textual interpretation, but by way of breath, sound, and guided meditation.
At the heart of the project was the proposition of “insufflation appreciation”: the theory that the “aura” of a painting, as Walter Benjamin described it, might be inhaled into the body. Lines, colours, textures, those elusive elements of artistic presence, were imagined as microscopic particles hovering in the atmosphere around the canvas, waiting to be drawn into the lungs and circulated through the bloodstream. The act of breathing thus became a mode of knowing, a way of metabolising art, and of encountering the archive in a visceral, embodied state.
The meditation unfolded across twelve short audio chapters, each one tuning into a different work, story, or resonance from the Borough Road Archive. The format was deliberately intimate: two to four minutes of listening, breathing, and dwelling with the collection. This slowed-down temporality felt like an antidote to the often hurried pace of the gallery, where visitors can find themselves moving swiftly from wall text to wall text. Here, instead, was an invitation to linger—to inhale, to absorb, to allow the archive to enter and circulate within.
Looking back, what feels most significant about Breathing in the Borough Road Archive is the way it reframed the act of interpretation itself. Rather than situating knowledge in the realm of the intellectual or purely visual, the project explored how atmosphere, sound, and embodied practice can shift the conditions of engagement. The Borough Road Archive was not only an object of study but also a living presence, encountered through a shared practice of breath.
This experiment has particular resonance for ongoing research into the idea of a placeless audio guide. If the 2019 project situated the experience firmly within the physical space of the gallery, the next step is to consider how such meditations might unfold beyond the walls of the institution. What happens when a collection’s aura becomes untethered from its material site, travelling with listeners as they move through other contexts? Could an audio guide create a mobile, placeless archive, one that hovers in memory, in headphones, in the rhythms of daily life?
In that sense, Breathing in the Borough Road Archive can be understood not only as a standalone event but also as a prototype. It raised questions about how we encounter collections, how they travel with us, and how sound and breath can be tools for carrying an archive into new forms of life. The work suggested that art’s aura may not be confined to the object or even the gallery, but may exist in the invisible spaces between bodies, atmospheres, and practices of attention.
To breathe in the archive, then, was not just to inhale the past but to imagine new futures for how collections might be experienced: intimately, metabolically, and without boundaries of place.