HOLY ISLAND (2025)
We Have Always Walked (Part II) continues Breath Quartet’s exploration of shelter as a space of spiritual, physical and ancestral refuge.
This work was created during an overnight pilgrimage to Holy Island, also known as Lindisfarne, a tidal landscape long associated with early monastic life, sanctuary and crossing thresholds. The island’s shifting access and deep time resonance offered a powerful backdrop for an unscripted collaboration. Ziza and Wilson arrived with a shared intention to remain responsive and open.
Ziza brought a hand-dyed textile used in a previous ritual performance in Chile, along with stories from a recent international residency. Wilson filmed using a small Fujifilm camera on loan from photographer James Merrell. Together they followed the horizon with a soft gaze, allowing the work to form at the edges of perception. The resulting footage is handheld and intentionally soft in focus, echoing the fragility of breath and the instability of remembering.
Later in quiet reflection they recorded Ziza’s recollections and performance of a Rwandan clapping song from childhood. That memory now informs the next phase of the project.
Herne edited the final film and composed a soundscape that carries the pulse of ancestral memory and evokes a borderless field where inner and outer worlds converge).