A Space for Tears (original) (raw)
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unFramed 25° : grieving and mourning as an art practice
„unFramed 25°“observes the rituals, the gestures and the spaces in the context of funeralsand abdictions. „myFunerals no 1 - no 3“ has delimited the field to a three-part assemblage of site, performance and gesture according to Sheik’s notion of everyday life and public sphere and to Pratt and Clifford’s concept of contact zones as social spaces, in which diverse social and cultural positions come into contact and have to coexist. The artistic strategy requires an appropriated space for framing the performative ritualisation as a special happening with the purpose of intriguing gestures of consolation, grief, pain and memory. Lefebvre’s trinity of space as spatial practices, representations of space and spaces of representation, and in accordance to Baudrillard’s „Symbolic Exchange and Death“ and De Certeau’s „The Practice of Everyday Life“, „unFramed 25°“ focus on the inconstancies and irregularities, on the unpunctual, on the indifferences in the overspill, in the traction and the accumulation. All practices of the „underdevelopped“ are in the spot. The art practice provides models of appropriation of and participation for the processs of grieving as a socially determined and of mourning as a more individual and personal coping strategy. The process of grief closely tied up with the ritual distinguishes also three phases: the separation, the transgression of thresholds (liminal phase) and the affilination to return. Jan Platvoet defines the ritual as a special happening, at a specific site and/or at a particular time, for a special occasion and gives common space significance through the use of adapted, culturally specific, corresponding constellations of core symbols. Performance Art, Intervention and Installation Art will be the artistic methods to transform the ritual chain into a frieze of gestures in a contact zone. „unFramed 25°“ purposes a hillslope on La Gomera (Spain) or the Wuhan metro line (China) as specific sites to be modeled through divers media. They will frame the space to implement the gestures which the performance serie has extracted from the everyday practice fragmented ritual chain of grieving and mourning.
Languages of Mourning: Between Page and (Modern) Stage
Philosophy Study, 2014
The aim of this essay is to provide an analysis of the Euripides' "Phoenician Women" in terms of mourning. The author intends to set a parallel between the ancient tragedy and its modern adaptation staged by one of the most prominent Polish directors Krzysztof Warlikowski. In the essay, the author will discuss how suffering is depicted in the ancient drama and what changes of mourning motif are introduced into its modern performance. The author will examine the literary as well as the (modern) theatrical topos of grief by analyzing the poetics of tragedy (dramatic structure, metaphors of death, dramatis personae, funeral vocabularium, function of laments) and the poetics of performance (stage design, costumes and props, funerary symbolism, acting, directing solutions). The purpose of the paper is to argue against the insignificance of Euripides' drama and the marginalization of Warlikowski's "Phoenician Women." Finally, the author will attempt to indicate the mourning motif as one of the essential and attractive for the ancient tragic plot and the modern performance as well.
2022
This article is proposed as a study on the issue of the relationship between the datum of death and the aesthetic context of the creation of a literary work, and therefore of authorial poetics. Starting with an in-depth study of the concept of literature and poetics 'of death', it will be intended to proceed with research on the related philosophical and critical issues, to provide an overview of the most important insights on the subject. Thanks to a comparative and transmedia approach, the discourse will be addressed to the theory of death in literature, considering in a broad sense the most significant contemporary critical proposals. Thus, literary and cinematographic case studies will be proposed, as part of a reflection on the issue from a theoretical point of view. The ontological implications relating to the creation of the work of art will also be considered, in order to deepen, with full awareness, the relationship between the poetics of death and works of a not only artistic and literary nature, but also the testimonial.
The Song of Absence: Blanchot and Kristeva on Loss, Melancholy, and Imagination
2007
Orpheus sings the loss of Eurydice. He sings her absence, and the voice of that absence stirs the shades of Hell, stills the roar of animals, and moves the very rocks to pity. The song of Orpheus is the dream of a poetic diction, of a singing, whose intensity lifts it beyond the crowded complacency of the everyday to uncover a cadence that disrupts the monotonous churning of the world. A song that will force itself even upon the obdurate inaccessibility of stone: such is the dream that has carried the voice of Orpheus beyond the banks of the river Hebrus to echo across the shores of our own turgid and difficult times. That the force of this singing is born of the articulation of an absence -- out of pain, out of loss -- must render this image of special significance in any speculation on the relations of absence to imagination, of sorrow to song, of melancholy to the libidinal economies of artistic expression. It is with a view to exploring some of these connections that this paper ...
The Presence of Grief: Research-Based Art and Arts-Based Research on Grief
Qualitative Inquiry, 2018
The authors involved in the creation of this text collaborate on a research project called The Culture of Grief, which explores the current conditions and implications of grief. The authors mostly employ conventional forms of qualitative inquiry, but the present text represents an attempt to reach a level of understanding not easily obtained through conventional methods. The group of authors participated as members of the audience in an avant-garde theatrical performance about grief, created by a group called CoreAct. The artists of CoreAct create their art through systematic research, in this case on grief, and we as researchers decided to study both the development of the play and its performance, and to report our impressions in fragments in a way that hopefully represents the nature of grief as an experienced phenomenon. We use Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s concept of presence to look for understanding beyond meaning in grief and its theatrical enactment.
2016
This research project examines the language of grief in textile art practice. It takes as its starting point the idea that, as individuals with experience of bereavement, we may carry with us an element of unresolved mourning. This is not the pathological condition of melancholia or complicated mourning, nor the fully resolved, completed state where mourning is over, but is a space between; a set of emotions which continue to be felt and may be brought to the surface by an event, situation, set of circumstances or encounter with, for example, artwork which may bring back feelings of grief and loss long after the death of someone close. This project investigates how cloth can be used in textile artwork to make a connection with this unresolved mourning and thereby contribute to the progression of the viewer’s work of mourning. The aims of the research are to explore how textile art can be used as a metaphor for grief and mourning and to consider how the staining and mending of cloth ...
The Poetics and Politics of Mourning
eSocial Sciences, 2020
In the age of publicized mourning and the appropriation of death for grand and often seedy spectacles, the interest in ways of dying has found repeated sparking points. Yet we see how some deaths find no resonance, almost as though there is no need to mourn them, being disposable lives and ungrievable deaths.
the silence of the tear: thinking the décollage
"With the ethic in mind of ‘learning to learn from below’, [this paper] traces a history of the Algerian struggle for independence, detailing imperial iconoclasm of the ‘image’ of sovereignty, and moreover the strategies of resistance and withdrawal. Beneath and against the “paralyzing, ordering, archiving silence” … a veiled rending of image, space, and language." / / / "...[t]his moment opportunes the exercise of a particular relation--or, to introduce a Badiouian term, rétournement--between artist, object, ideology, and spectator--or, between text and image; iterability and language. This paper posits a poetics of autonomy of artistic practice through a Badiouian reading of the ‘silence’ of the ‘tear’."
“Virtuoso[S] Of Departure”. A Few Contemporary Poems’ Response To Absence
2018
This paper reads three poems on absence in the light of current theories of the object, hoping to clarify various trends in contemporary poetry’s relation to absence. The three poems, “Meditations at Lagunitas” by Robert Hass (1979), “Silverfish, Moth” by Matthew Francis (2014), and “Pipistrelles” by Kathleen Jamie (2004) are extremely different in the functions and connotations they ascribe to absence. However, common trends emerge in the readings: the stronger the presence of a persona, the less space is allowed to absence in the poems; poems preoccupied with absence proceed by flashes, featuring being as “vibratory” in that it is mostly absent from our human perspective yet discloses itself to us intermittently; and finally, language seems at no point to be conceived as erasing the presence of its referee, or unable to refer to the ineffable: absence, in those poems, occurs in spite of words rather than because of them.