A mater of loss

How can one imagine speaking to grief using language? How do we hold such a thing within language, imperial language no less? When we centre grief, do we make it generic? When you say grief and I say grief, is it even possible to mean the same thing? What is missing when we say grief, when we gather to contemplate grief, when we claim to research grief? This article explores these and other questions in a multidisciplinary format combining film, images and autobiographical writing

Listening to the Vultures

Through this text, I will share the path I threaded starting from an individual one-to-one practice of mediation between a person deceased and a person alive, the Landscapes of the Dead, and arriving to a collective performative practice of noisy listening titled To know the vultures so well. This path has led me through intimate in-depth research on the different sensorial and imaginal relations we can establish with the dead. How did I relate to them as invisible entities that accompany the living? How was their apparent absence made present through different bodily practices? The research was developed in response to the apparently “disenchanted” western context where I have been residing for almost 20 years, in which death is something that needs to be dealt with as quickly and as silently as possible. Certain places in the world get to forget about the killings that sustain their lives, because they have been made to forget that they too will die. Within my practice, loss is acting as an amplifier of connections with the world. Seeing death as part of life does not stop the grieving and the mourning, it does not dissolve the fear of death, but it does mean that we can inhabit the affective places made of the discomfort of loss and the discomfort of not knowing.  

Hilos/Threads: Appropriating the public space through collective weaving and grieving in the context of feminicide in Mexico

Through a decolonial feminist lens this paper unpacks the artistic project Sangre de mi sangre (“blood of my blood”). understood as an art protest by the feminist Mexican art collective Colectiva Hilos (“threads collective”). This work situates Sangre de mi sangre in the history of feminist textile artistic interventions, and specifically within those interventions that aim to take the public space in the context of gender violence. The work of Colectiva Hilos is also socio-politically situated in the history of Latin American political artistic interventions in the context of extreme forms of violence such as feminicide (killing of women because of their gender) and forced disappearance, and forms part of a plural and vibrant feminist movement present across the region. The members of the collective seek to repair the social fabric through collective weaving while using this long red textile to make visible the absences of those who have been victims of disappearance and feminicide in Mexico. Violence is an experience that has meant a fracture of our relations. This is also a painful experience. Where there is pain, there is loss and the need for grieving. This work considers decolonial thinker Rolando Vázquez’s (2018) ideas on healing and grieving to unpack the power of repair in the work of Colectiva Hilos

Noticing Grief in the Body

In this time of political uncertainty, many of us are striving to create ways of being that will generate more care, compassion and equity in the collective. However, it can be hard to sustain this work when we are weighed down by untended grief. In the West, numbing or distracting ourselves when we feel discomfort or grief is very common. How can we reclaim our ability to be with grief, as part of the rhythm of our lives? I sense that we must re-learn to identify where our bodies are holding grief, to make space to be with it, when this feels supportive for us. Once we can notice where grief is sitting within our bodies, we can choose how to respond. This is a practice, not a one-time event. Grief is not limited to the death of a loved one; we can grieve the loss of our homelands, the loss of former versions of ourselves or the pain of war and state violence. Untended grief can linger, smothering our creative capacity and ability to vision, until we give it space to be acknowledged. This exercise may support you to touch into grief that might be present in your body. After the practice, you can decide how you want to be in relationship to what arises

The Erotics of Grieves

The Erotics of Grieves explores grieving as a portal to liberation and social transformation. Written at the time of the ongoing genocidal violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the repression of solidarity movements in Berlin, this piece situates grieves in political, historical, and embodied contexts. Moving away from a singular, universalist concept of grief, this work conceptualizes grieves as plural, relational, and metabolically intimate processes that shape and unsettle bodies, communities, and social infrastructures. Drawing from Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic and Fred Moten’s Erotics of Fugitivity, it asks how grieving can resist hegemonic power structures and create generative spaces of solidarity, refusal, and world-making. Through autotheoretical reflection, cultural analyses, and embodied performance practices this article traces the visceral, affective, and sonic dimensions of grieves. Engaging with legacies of mourning rituals, racialized and planetary grief, and the vibratory intimacies of sound, it proposes an erotics of grieves as a mode of attunement to loss, connection, and futurity beyond the fantasy of separation. In a time of structural violence, erasure, and epistemicide, The Erotics of Grieves insists on grieving as a radical force of resistance, fugitivity, and transformative care

An Elongated Shrieking Song That Envisions Glimpses of Liberation Through Overwhelm

In “An Elongated Shrieking Song That Envisions Glimpses of Liberation through Overwhelm” I explore my artistic practice of moaning through the lens of “traumatophilia” and “overwhelm” as proposed by Avgi Saketopoulou, a Greek psycho-analyst practicing in New York. I am braiding into these reflections the question of Saidiya Hartman’s in “Venus in Two Acts” that has been delightfully haunting me, that is: “What are the kinds of stories to be told by those and about those who live in such an intimate relationship with death? Romances? Tragedies? Shrieks that find their way into speech and song?” This contemplation on the moan calls for a renewed relationship to cultural performances of loss and grief as forms of protest and disruption of public amnesia, in times of rising fascism, militarisation and ongoing genocides.

On Grief At The End Of The World: A Black, Disabled, Queer Ritual For Personal And Global Apocalypse

Shedding is personal process, an interpersonal practice, and a guide map to societal and structural justice. Guided by the wisdom of creatures who shed their skin, On Grief At The End Of The World is a reflection on a moment of personal apocalypse and a ritual or practice for liberation: A snake doesn’t hesitate when it’s time to shed. She doesn’t try to cling to something uncomfortable but familiar, she doesn’t worry what lies on the other side of shedding, who she’ll be, will others recognize her. She simply sheds because her body knows it is time.

Whale grief: Episodes I + II

In this piece, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca offers two stories that approach the experience of grief and loss from an interspecies perspective with a particular focus on whales. Whilst much mainstream debate and academic literature continues to frame grief as exclusively human, or to position human grief as the standard for grieving per se, Cull Ó Maoilearca follows the work of anthropologist Barbara King (2013) amongst others to attend to whales as both the subjects and objects of grief.  Mapping entanglements of oppressions stemming from speciesism, colonialism, capitalism and racism, the first story mourns the loss of animals including two beluga whales in the 1865 fire at P. T. Barnum\u27s American Museum. The second story attends to the specific case of Tahlequah: the orca who in 2018 pushed the body of her newborn, which died shortly after birth, with her snout for 17 days, in what whale biologists called ‘a show of grief’

Wounded Objects: Mexican and Global Contexts of Disposable Life

This article proposes the concept of the wounded object as an approach to perceptions and representations of disability, wounding, and death, and in particular to ambivalent separations between the living and the dead, the human and the non-human, the singular and the multiple, the identified and the anonymous. My reading is informed by the unequally distributed proliferation of violence in our contemporary global landscape, through which some bodies and populations are designated as more disposable and closer to death than others. The asymmetrical processes of making-disposable take place in regions impacted by war as well as in many settings shaped by racism, economic exploitation and precarity. In this analysis I focus on the juxtaposition of two specific scenarios from Mexico and from the Mexico-US borderlands. The first of these is the statistical display of mortality rates produced by the Mexican government in the COVID-19 era. The second is a lithograph by contemporary artist Linda Lucia Santana, depicting the skull of Joaquín Murrieta, the nineteenth-century outlaw and lynching victim. While the first instance refers to a biopolitical model through which numerical data perform the obscuring of death or damage, the second suggests the enactment of sovereign power through the spectacle of a targeted killing, and thus performs a more explicit encounter with destruction. In each case, the wounded object, a troubled conjuring of past and continuing violence, offers evidence of diverse representations of damaged life, and a framework for the denunciation of both tangible and ephemeral injustices.