Franziska Bauer
To Publish Grief
– of communicational practices between grief and mourning: of isolated democratic feelings and everyday immodest practices of making a disruptive emotion public
Grieving is the most radical feeling a person can encounter. Like falling in love, it changes the light on everything. Grieving is also a radically democratic feeling. It does hit everyone more or less strongly, more or less often, more or less early in life.
Yet, grieving, in the western modern society, is one of the most isolated and tabooed feelings in live. Saying it with Vinciane Despret when she references Geoffrey Gorer, it is as if death is attached to something pornographic, obscene. We condole with somebody in silent memory. As if grieving, like sex, is allowed, but only behind closed doors, in silence and withdrawal from public, that the neighbors can’t hear nor see anything of it. Yet, there are culturally infused rituals of mourning. Hence, does mourning that is deeply connected to ones process of grieving even exist? How does grief and mourning communicate with each other? If there is a membrane between the two, is it a semipermeable one? With selective permeability? What atoms of grief work its way into mourning and vice versa? Which ones should move across more often? Or at all? How can art-design-poetry be a transmitter for these atoms to move?
This phenomenon shall be researched in an intersectional, politically engaged, performative, published, public manner through artistic, writing and graphic design practices.