Earth's Breath
This flowing meditation invites us to take a breath of gratitude in communion and union with plant life.
Artist, yogi and doula Tabita Rezaire is part of Back to Earth, Serpentine’s long-term project addressing the ongoing climate emergency. Back to Earth supports artist-led campaigns and projects, including AMAKABA, “a healing centre in the forests of French Guiana, dedicated to the arts and sciences of Earth, Body and Sky”, which Rezaire opened in 2020. For Serpentine’s current Back to Earth exhibition, AMAKABA collaborated with Olaniyi Studio to create IKUM, a woven temple filled with drying plants, each species with a special healing or health-giving significance. From the Amazon rainforest, Rezaire now offers a meditation to accompany the exhibition. Mirroring IKUM, this is an auditory space to ease us into our bodies, sensing their deep and vital entanglement with the plants who gift us life-sustaining oxygen.
To breathe with mother earth, listen to this meditation. Our lives depend on the soil we walk upon. Let us protect our soils so it may remain fertile for many generations to come. If you are not yet aware of the #savesoil campaign, I invite you to take a look.
– Tabita Rezaire
Landing
An extract from Womb Consciousness by Tabita Rezaire.
I’d like to share an invitation with you: one of honouring the land.
First honouring the land of our birth. Wherever we were born, even if we don’t know where, or have never been back to that place, let us cultivate gratitude for the land which welcomed our first breath. This may be challenging for some, as our relationship with places can hurt as much as our relationship with people. If so, gently be present to that discomfort. Listen to its chorus. Then take yourself on a journey to all the lands that have supported, nourished and fed you as you’ve grown. All these places are a part of you. All these places made you.
Then spend some time to honour the lands of your ancestors. Which lands did your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and all your forefathers and foremothers walk upon? See how these places create a myriad of paths around the earth, which have allowed all these people to meet and birth your lineages, generation after generation. These lands are also a part of you. Express your gratitude for the soils that have received your ancestors so you can now walk upon the earth.
Now you may want to extend this gratitude to the ancestors of the land on which you now live. What is the history of that place? Neighbourhood? House? Who or what thrived there before you? Who has had to leave for you to live there now?
In your own ways, you’ll know how to honour or at least remember all the lands that have offered you and those who came before air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat. As well as the places we have lost, or in which we got lost, the ones we forgot, or fear… as they too have made us who we are. Then let us celebrate the lands that have welcomed us, embraced us, and cherished us as a mother. As we are all children of the earth.
We have all come from the land, let us never forget that we’ll come back to feed her.
We are land.
About Tabita Rezaire
Tabita Rezaire is infinity longing to experience itself in human form. Her path as an artist, devotee, yogi, doula, and cacao farmer is all geared towards manifesting the divine in herself and beyond. As an eternal seeker, Tabita’s yearning for connection finds expression in her cross-dimensional practices, which envision network sciences – organic, electronic and spiritual – as healing technologies to serve the shift towards heart consciousness.
Embracing digital, corporeal and ancestral memory, she digs into scientific imaginaries and mystical realms to tackle the colonial wounds and energetic misalignments that affect the songs of our body-mind-spirits. Tabita’s work is rooted in time-spaces where technology and spirituality merge as fertile ground to nourish visions for connection and emancipation. Through screen interfaces and healing circles, her offerings aim to nurture our collective growth and expand our capacity for togetherness.
Tabita is based near Cayenne in French Guyana, where she is currently studying Agriculture and birthing AMAKABA – her vision for collective healing in the Amazonian forest. Tabita is devoted to becoming a mother to the world.
Her offerings have been shared widely – Centre Pompidou, Paris; MASP, São Paulo; Serpentine, London; MoMa, NY; New Museum, NY; Gropius Bau, Berlin; MMOMA, Moscow; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; ICA London; V&A London; National Gallery Denmark; The Broad LA; MoCADA, NY; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, Paris – and presented for international biennales in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Kochi, Athens, and Berlin.
She is represented by the Goodman Gallery in South Africa.
