It is widely known that one of humanity’s great ambitions is to challenge time and live forever. For this reason, ceasing to breathe, even for only a few minutes, is at once a taboo, a challenge, and an achievement. The exhibition, Candela Capitán’s first in Mexico and also the first in which the artist—choreographer, but also an artist—fully enters the territory of installation, is titled Apnea. It is an installation activated by bodies that transforms the gallery space into a kind of “near-future spa.” With a complex yet, at first glance, deceptively simple system of pipes, Candela turns the space into a circuit designed to feed a particular fountain/pool. A fountain, because water emerges from this central element; and a bathtub, because at certain moments it becomes a place to train in the difficult art of holding one’s breath.
At a moment marked by a renewed interest in the Odyssey and in the figure of Odysseus, it is worth remembering that one of the oldest and most reliable written traces of the practice of freediving already appears in Homer, around 750 BCE. Later, around 480 BCE, Herodotus describes a man named Scyllias of Scione as the greatest diver of his time, someone capable of recovering objects and treasures from shipwrecks for his Persian merchant clients.
In recent decades, many artists have turned their attention to the Haenyeo, the tradition of female divers from the island of Jeju, in Korea. These women can descend to depths of around ten meters, remain underwater for approximately one minute during each dive, and work for hours, alternating between immersion and recovery. When they surface, they produce a characteristic breathing sound known as sumbisori. This sound embodies the fact that breathing here is not simply a physiological necessity, but becomes almost the sonic punctuation of the work. Imagine this sound in your mind. Imagining oxygen entering the lungs once again allows us to imagine its gradual absence. In reality, apnea is a technique that trains the body to manage that absence. It is not about doing without oxygen, but about extending the amount of time during which the body can function without inhaling again.
Candela Capitán describes the structure developed to perform an apnea in the gallery as a “near-future spa.” When I first heard this definition, it surprised me. From the perspective of someone who, like me, cannot hold their breath for even a few seconds longer without falling into a dark panic, apnea seems like the furthest thing from a spa and much closer to caressing its opposite: anxiety in its purest form. To understand her words, we need to understand that training does not eliminate the need to breathe, but is instead aimed at radically altering our relationship to the alarm the body produces in response to that need. It is about learning to remain a little longer within that alarm. To recognize the moment when the body begins to ask for air, to listen as that request intensifies, and, rather than responding immediately, to remain calm. Little by little, the body discovers that urgency is not yet the limit. It learns not to rush, to expend less, to move less, to trust its reserves. Apnea does not silence the alarm: it teaches us how to inhabit it.
At a moment marked by anxiety, panic, and paralysis as constant features of our physical response to social, political, and economic conditions that overwhelm us and expose just how alone we feel in the face of our circumstances, I find Candela Capitán’s proposal extraordinary. It is extraordinary because it places all its force and emphasis on understanding what an alarm is, and proposes a different way of studying it, relating to it, and even using it for our own pleasure.
Apnea appears to me as a social sculpture, almost in historical terms: a work capable of awakening in us a pedagogical impulse aimed at understanding our relationship with alarm and the need to train ourselves to experience it differently. Anxiety possesses the particular capacity to turn a signal into a threat, and that threat into a new signal. The body becomes alarmed, and we become alarmed by the fact that the body has become alarmed.
Apnea proposes a strange exercise in the opposite direction. It deliberately produces one of the most elemental alarms we possess—the need to breathe—and teaches us that between the appearance of an alarm and our reaction to it, there exists a small space. Learning to remain within that space is one of the most radical forms of calm there is.
At the same time, the performance, which takes place once a week and is carried out by bodies that have already arrived at this place, dressed in a suit designed by Candela specifically for the occasion, exposes us to the dramaturgy and choreographic intensity of this artist’s work, but from a different position. The body that does not breathe underwater is also a body that dances underwater, adding a fantastical dimension to this figure suspended between the natural and the supernatural.
I cannot help but think of Ophelia, the young woman in love with Hamlet who, after her father is killed by Hamlet and as she descends into madness, ultimately drowns, and of all the Ophelias who came after her: drowned women, deaths represented with extraordinary beauty following violent deaths. Candela Capitán’s female divers, by contrast, survive. They have learned to control their circumstances and offer us the great reversal of feminine death, and the best news possible: its absence.
These women underwater do not simply avoid death: they resurface. And they do not simply resurface: they reign.
Chus Martínez, Director of the Institute Art Gender Nature at the Basel Academy of Art and Design, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW).