– a participatory performance from artists Youngsook Choi and Sophie Seita, with Jaelee Kim and Rike Scheff
Artists Youngsook Choi and Sophie Seita have been developing scores for movements, gestures, sound-making, and listening, in relation to the eco-intelligence of more-than-human species. As part of this long-term exploration, the participatory performance ‘Scales of Breathing’ stages experimental breathing gestures that imagine interspecies collaboration, inspired by the earthworms’ soil works with microbial species and strategic diapause (suspended engagement) when the soil environment is malnourishing.
With the joint forces of choreographer Jaelee Kim and sound artist and poet Rike Scheffler, the work-in-progress performance was well received at the Seoul Museum of Art, curated by Sungmin Lim last November, and the first full iteration will be presented at LADA.
Under the overarching ethics of decolonial and queer ecology, this participatory performance forges new embodied sensibilities in cooperation and reciprocity. It is materialised through composting gestures, poetic instructions, sound and rhythm, light sensitivity, humidity, active pauses, and collective enquiries, developing what they frame as ‘eco-literacy’.
*Original commission by Seoul Museum of Art, Korea, with additional support from Goethe Institute and Goldsmiths University of London.
Bios
Youngsook Choi is an artist and ecogrief advocate whose socially engaged, site-specific practice explores intimate aesthetics of solidarity, postulating feeling and compassion as fundamental ways of knowing. Ecological grief is central to her work. Mobilising collective witnessing as a socio-political autopsy and building eco-literacy as an emergent pedagogy, Youngsook’s ongoing body of work, In Every Bite of the Emperor (since 2021), interweaves transnational narratives of neocolonial extraction across the Northern UK, Malaysian Rainforest and Central Vietnam. Embedding organising and collective imagination into her art language, Youngsook founded the eco-grief council ‘Foreshadowing’ and co-founded the practice-based research collective ‘Decolonising Botany’.
Sophie Seita is an artist and researcher who works with an expanded understanding of language as a sensuous, sonic, and embodied material translated and moulded into or experienced as live performances, performative objects, publications, sound pieces, drawings-as-scores, lecture performances, talking textiles, garment sculptures as artist book or potential sets, creative audio descriptions, and somatic workshops. Committed to ambivalence, difficulty, play, to what can’t be communicated directly, but what makes the senses fizz and shimmer, Seita teaches in the School of Art at Goldsmiths, and recently held residencies with Akademie der Künste (Berlin), Studio Voltaire (London), and Khata Maysternya (Ukraine).
Jae Lee Kim is a dance director, dramaturg, and dance scholar based in Seoul. She previously served as dramaturg for the Korea National Contemporary Dance Company and as co-editor-in-chief of the Society for Dance Documentation and History. In her recent work Yaho Yaho: Echoing Dance (2025), she explores choreographic and relational conditions shaped through dance in relation to neurodiversity.
Rike Scheffler is a poet, performer, sound artist and curator working across language, music, installation and live performance. Her practice explores art as a space of community, possibility and transformative encounter, often inviting audiences into speculative worlds where boundaries between nature/culture, human/machine, and animate/inanimate have dissolved. Her recent immersive triptych Lava. Rituale (2023) spans poetry collection, concert performance, and sound/video installation, exploring tenderness, interspecies alliance and critical collaboration with more-than-human agents and AI. She has presented work internationally, including at Neue Nationalgalerie & Hamburger Bahnhof, The Arts House, and Palais de Tokyo.
Event information
The event includes a performative conversation with a soundscape, followed by an opportunity to socialise. This is a seated event. Various seating options will be available including fold out chairs, office chairs, a sofa and a bench. All are welcome to join in a relaxed space and are free to come and go as they please. The lighting will be fixed with no sudden changes and microphone amplification will be used. There are disposable masks and hand sanitiser available.