Batabata Practice emerged from within Being Keepers. Batabata is a Japanese onomatopoeia describing the sound of a person falling down. When years of exhaustion reached their limit, I embraced collapse as an autonomous methodology: doing nothing, staying in bed, reclaiming my own time. I invited others to join me: ‘Let’s fall down together’. It was a quiet, bright, and almost humorous surrender.
Batabata is an ethical refusal of endurance, and of the expectation that we must always bounce back. With the artist and researcher Chris Berthelsen I co-founded the Batabata Collective. We agreed to let each other fall down whenever and however we needed, instead of trying to fix each other. We practised ‘desilience’ and called ourselves ‘Batabata compost heaps’, pursuing an autonomous unproductivity.
To practise Batabata is to hold collapse gently. A pause can be a way to continue, a form of listening that lets the body decide when it can rise again. The work does not end; it continues, quietly, as the sound of survival.