Specifications: 2hr duration, held monthly, Zoom call
griefing, poetry: pandemic
A collaboration with Toronto-based poet nic lachance, griefing, poetry: pandemic started as an artistic response to the UK and Canada loosening COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and the state-managed transition to the “new normal” that followed. griefing calls attention to the collective pool of grief and lack of grief-tending spaces as a result of colonialism in the global West and worldwide. It sees the erasure of grief spaces as a form of social control.
Through structured ritual and facilitated space for communion, griefing stewards an idea of grief not as an inconvenience to overcome, but as a technology of emergence, a trafficking of edges, a transference of borders, an invitation to eat the meal of our times, a transformative perceptive quality (“because maybe we see clearer with the tears in our eyes” – Bayo Akomolafe).
Four years in, griefing deals with the metaphysics of digital communion, interweb transmissions of wetness, and the relational bonds that make communal grief-tending possible.
- + 2. slides for griefing, poetry: pandemic (2022)
3.+ 4. slides for griefing, poetry: continued (2023)
5. + 6. griefing digital photographs (2022)