From Common Ground was a group exhibition presented at Sidecar at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, curated by Salim Moore, and organized as part of the Valmont Foundation’s fire-response support initiatives following the devastating wildfires in and around Los Angeles. The exhibition brought together artists whose practices engage with care, resilience, and collective recovery, foregrounding shared ground—both literal and emotional—after rupture.
As part of the opening program, Marcos Lutyens presented Respair, a live hypnotic induction performance developed specifically for the exhibition. The performance took place on July 12, 2025, and was conceived as a collective act of recalibration in the wake of loss. Sound design was created and performed by Aaron Drake.
The title Respair—from the Latin respirare, “to breathe again”—once signified the return of hope. Entering English alongside despair in the 15th century, the word later disappeared, leaving a linguistic imbalance that privileges loss over renewal. Drawing on this forgotten term, the performance explored how language shapes emotional and psychological states, and how restoring neglected vocabularies might subtly shift collective perception.
Through verbal hypnotic techniques, Respair invited participants into a shared state of heightened attention, embedding restorative language as a lived experience rather than an abstract idea. In the context of From Common Ground, the performance functioned as a quiet counterweight to devastation—an offering of pause, breath, and renewed orientation within a community processing trauma together. Video filmed/edited by Eric Minh Swenson