Franziska Bauer
To Publish Grief
On radical publishing from grief to mourning
Grief is a response to severe loss and a very common yet highly individualized disruption to the meanings of life. The encounter with grief can lead us into the dark – a place of destabilizing – where learning to be with it demands for a shift in thinking and acting towards the life before and after.
Grief is directed towards the private, affective side of loss, while mourning inhabits the rather public and ritualized side of it. This tension between the private and the public can be conceptualized metaphorically, with grief residing in an apartment and mourning situated in its immediate surroundings.
This research project is embeded into my practice of graphic design. It is a study of the manner in which the two spheres of grief and mourning interact with each other. How does one move out of the apartment, considering modes of editing, correcting or styling? Considering modes of context and situatedness, how does mourning leave its dirt in grief’s apartment even if it took off its shoes?
A critical examination of radical publishing and its tools of graphic design, writing, editing, and facilitating is used to understand the relational tension of the affective and the edited. How can this relation be shifted? Which economies of reason, affect and emotion influence acts of making public?
This artistic research project investigates the expansion of the term "publishing" to unfold its significance as a common, everyday practice of rendering emotions, reflections, and narratives accessible to the public. In a transdisciplinary manner, it will engage with queer_feminist, power-critical discourses about publicnesses and aftercare. These notions will be approached from different vantage points not only as social constructs, but as practical circumstances. The pratical lens at use is graphic design and is herefore regarded as a collective, socially conscious and context-driven practice.
The central research objective is to explore and offer gestures of making and holding space for grief and its moments of "un_meaning". In this context "un_meaning" is a term appropriated from Jack Halberstam's body of work. It outlines the obscenity of questioning fundamental assumptions of the prevailing courses of things.
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Andrea Sick at the University of the Arts Bremen (DE) and Prof. Dr. Anke Haarmann and Dr. Anja Groten at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (Leiden University and Royal Academy of Art, NL).