BREATHING, 2005
BBC Broadcasting House, London, UK
Commissioned by: The British Broadcasting Corporation, 2002
Curated by: Vivien Lovell - Modus Operandi Art Consultant
Breathing is a 48 foot high inverted glass cone, etched with a text about silence, written by the artist himself, rising from the roof of the new Broadcasting House building. At dark the cone glows and at key times a white light beam projects from its base into the night sky.
The piece is sensitive to its context while adding a highly poetic element, which is appropriate alongside the messages of aspiration and open radio mast on Broadcasting House. The piece gives them another dimension, and also uses the lip-out windows in the new building as an effective "plinth" grounding it in the overall scheme.
BREATHING:
Life
turns and turns on the crystal glass.
The sonorous glass trembles with the touch
and speaks:
It's voice is our voice
It's body is our body
Life
turns and turns on the crystal body.
Our body tattooed by silence.
Like a lighthouse on the coast, we need to locate points
of reference in our lives that help us to fix, like a perfume,
the most fleeting scents, the flashing sparkles.
Silence grows toward the silence and quiets.
Each person is a "place".
Every woman, every man, every child is a habitable space that shifts and evolves;
A "place" in the sense of time, geography, volume and color.
Life
turns and turns on the crystal glass,
on our silent body.
Silent is a desire, a dream, an aspiration,
something so unknown and inaccessible, that we can only imagine it.
Silence is a voice, our voice.
Silence is a body, our body.
Life
turns and turns on the crystal glass breathing in our body.
I invite you to breathe.
I invite you to imagine the silence.
Jaume Plensa. Chicago, October 2003
