2025

Candace Couse and Manjot Kaur

How Long It Takes One Leaf to Produce a Breath of Oxygen draws attention to the invisible, shared exchanges that sustain life, urging the viewer to recognize how deeply intertwined we are with the landscapes that breathe with us.

The work asks the viewer to consider the relationship between the self as an individual and the self as a collective—as an ecosystem. Here, breathing becomes performance. As an embodied gesture, breathing is the taking of “something out of the world and transforming it into part of our body,” as Philosopher Emanuele Coccia writes, an act which repeatedly denies our separation from the world, allowing the spirit and matter, the seen and unseen, subject and object and self and non-self to engage in a dance of continuous interchange. 

This collaborative project explores breath and its connection to body and land. Couse and Kaur consider land as a living entity—not as a backdrop—but as an active participant. This work combines a projected video documenting a ritual and a laboratory experiment. The ritual embodies the act of “Breathing into” the landscape using modified organic structures formed into a woven tube, which mirrors the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between plants and other organisms, centring breath through its relational exchange with body and land. The tube is gently placed into mosses and oxygen-producing plants as carbon dioxide is expelled from the lungs. 

The video is projected onto a wall lined with glass shelves that house individual leaves submerged in Mason jars. The leaves are actively producing oxygen, as evidenced by the accumulation of delicate spherical bubbles of oxygen on the surface of the leaves. Lastly, a seat plinth sits in front of the work, which houses an audio component representing sounds that plants make during photosynthesis fused with human breath. 

This project is an act to reclaim the forgotten memory that the human body is an extension of the land itself.