Welcome.

There are few living platforms at Colgate that bring people together to find voice and speak life from the margins. This limits our individual and collective abilities, as members of the Colgate community, to understand how each other’s struggles, passions, and the expression of these struggles and passions, are inherently linked to others, and instrumental in shaping our entire lives. Collective Breathing (learn more here) is a space where unheard contemporary voices from the Colgate community  engage in a collaborative process of breathing life into our stories for ourselves and the wider Colgate community.


As a member of Collective Breathing I, Sharon Nicol, designed a companion independent study entitled Collective Breathing: The Making and Memory of a Feminist Art/Performance Collective. This blog is the home of my work in the course and an archive of my experiences within the collective.


The Collective Breathing course is centered around three major themes—Shaping(Making), Telling(Living), Remembering(Archiving). These themes exist as a framework for the present collective and future generations. Shaping the Collective Breathing project involves developing the vision for the current collective, understanding who is part of the vision, and determining how the vision will be realized. Telling the project means executing the vision, whether it be a communal creative space and/or an end-of-semester performance. Telling is not only about the end-product, but all that exists between. Remembering the project focuses on how a project’s herstory is preserved for those involved and future generations. Remembering is in conversation with content and medium, asking what do participants want to be remembered and how? These processes can occur simultaneously, at varying lengths, out of order, and sometimes not at all, yet having engaged with other models that uptake such a structure and in recording the collective’s experiences with these themes as they happen, we will be better able to return to order/the vision if there are any missteps during the process, and better contextualize our outcomes post-vision. Through this blog, I will document my reflections as I move through the Collective Breathing syllabus (which can be viewed here, along with the independent study proposal) 


This is my attempt at remaining accountable and transparent with my own thoughts and further humanizing the process myself and fellow collective breathers are engaged in, for generations to come. I am imperfect, and I recognize the value of sharing the imperfections of the building process in order to sustain this work.

I welcome feedback and hope that you will stay engaged throughout our journey. Please visit the larger Collective Breathing Blog/Archive that will feature voices of the whole group.



Thursday 9 March 2017

The Life of Nicole Salloway




 ------What is Nicole's biggest fear?--------
Nicole Salloway is tired. She thinks she's been tired for all of her 37 years. She's scared that all she'll ever be is a sad and tired woman who was once a sad and tired little girl. She is hyperaware of the plate in front of her and can feel every morsel as she eats. She's worried that this week will be another bad one. She hopes that Nancy doesn't come over and throw her food out. The deafening silence is claustrophobic and is only broken with the precise move of the fork. "No one loves me" she often thinks. "I have done nothing to standout in this world, why would anyone care?"

--------The five most important memories in Nicole's life------
1) her niece's first communion
2) Her high school graduation
3)When her most serious boyfriend said "I love you"
4) When she said it back 4 months later; she let him in
5) When he died in a car crash seven years ago


---------What keeps Nicole up at night?-------
Sometimes he visits me at night. I bought oregano last week because I read something about it helpin with spirits and heartache.. or maybe it was heartburn.. Oh well, either way it'll be a nice addition to my vegetable soup. They say that soup is filling. I'm giving it a try so maybe I won't feel so empty, and maybe I can pretend I'm healthy... I always look forward to going to sleep at night even though it's been so long since it's actually happened. When I put on my PJs, silk ones the woman in the department store recommended and coincidentally one of the only ones they had in my size, I always think about the pink slippery PJs I wore as a little girl. Back then mama would lay me across her lap and brush my hair, then she'd take off my glasses, because I always fell asleep with them on. Sometimes when I'm wearing contacts I wish a had a nice big pair of glasses and mama was around to take them off for me, but ever since the divorce its been hard for Nancy to see me.



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