The panel talk Field Notes From Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum with Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva took place during Sonic Acts Biennial 2024.

Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva move through extended material and research, including songs, interviews, stories, confessions, readings and intimations that came to them in the making and aftermath of Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum. The second instalment in the Elemental Cinema series which takes the classical elements as a guide to help reimagine the world as otherwise, Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum is a film dedicated to tenderness. It reproduces a radical sensibility learned from listening to the blues, to skin, heat, and echoes, and listening itself. Neuman and Ferreira da Silva ask, could tenderness dissolve total violence? Could tears displace total extraction? Towards this, they reimagine the human and its subject-formation away from predatory desire and lethal abstraction, away from the mind and eyes and noble senses, away from total extraction and its articulations as ethnography, border regimes, slavery, sexual abuse, trade, and mining. Instead, through skin and resonance, tenderness is explored as the raw material of our reimagined earthy sensibility. Remembering that to be tender is to soften like supple grass, and that to attend to is to care for – to serve. Serving, we know, is the opposite of slavery, just as violence dissolves with care.