static Apena

how long you can hold your breath?

The discipline of holding one’s breath underwater, motionless — static apnea. In 2020, breath itself was taken away: by a virus, by a knee, by uncertainty. The struggle to restore it left us motionless, collectively holding our breath. How long can you hold yours? Would it be long enough to save yourself? Would it be long enough to save someone you love?

In Static Apnea, a single audience member enters a tunnel of blue light and descends toward a lone performer, visible behind a wall of glass. The performance lasts nine minutes and two seconds — the female world record for static apnea — transforming endurance into an act of witness.

This installation is both elemental and urgent, exploring how far one might be willing to go to preserve life, and what it means to exist at the threshold between survival and surrender.

Artist Statement

Static Apnea was created in response to 2020, a year when breath itself was taken away. Taken by a virus that filled lungs until they collapsed. Taken by a knee pressed into George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. Taken by the suffocating stillness of lockdown, when isolation left us holding our breath in uncertainty.

At the american vicarious, we are compelled by moments when the most basic human acts — breathing, moving, gathering — are politicized, threatened, or denied. In Static Apnea, the discipline of holding one’s breath underwater becomes a metaphor for a collective condition: endurance strained to its breaking point, survival turned into an act of witness.

We made this work to sit inside that tension — between fragility and resilience, despair and hope, surrender and resistance. It asks not only how long can you hold your breath, but how far will you go to save a life?

Press Quotes

• “Highbrow | Brilliant” - New York Magazine, The Approval Matrix

• “Again, it’s live and in-person (I still tear up when I write that), … sleek environmental design and sensorial intensity.” - Vulture

• “Fascinating to behold… You navigate through a narrow, winding path with mirrors on each side until a walkway appears ... The walls to your left and right glow a rich cobalt ... and, later, other piercing shades, that give the unnerving sense of being surrounded — trapped, even... Static Apnea had me holding my breath” - The New York Times, Critic Pick

• “A triumph of design … outré theater” - New York Theater