Visions for Crossing
Ongoing research project
ArchiVolt, Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp
Visions for Crossing is a two-year artistic research project developed at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. The project focuses on the “laying out” of the corpse, namely the acts of washing, grooming, and dressing the dead. I am drawn to the liminality of these gestures, which mark a transition between end-of-life and beginning-of-death and reveal death as a process rather than an instant. Mortuary care is therefore part of a wider vision of death as encompassing a multiplicity of unfoldings, material and immaterial. The research questions the porosity in the experience of disappearance and wonders how tactile intimacy with the dead might transform a relationship with grief and death.
This research emerges from a longer engagement with death and dying. I am a palliative care volunteer trained in active listening and relational touch, accompanying terminally ill patients and their relatives. Across my practice “being in the room” functions as a methodology: a commitment to presence, slowness, and receptivity, wishing to sense through my own body what is at stake. As feminist philosopher Nina Lykke puts it “to approach death as a carnal, visceral and very material event and grief as a difficult and serious bodywork.” The project leads me to collaborate with Palliative Care nurses and to assist a funeral director in her death care work. Ethical questions relating to the representation of the deceased and their care are central in my work, considering the corpse through a prism of agency and vibrancy.
Upcoming publication in the Forum+ April issue
Visions for Crossing & Vivid Tales
First experimentation of the work in progress “Playing Dead”
Research Class for master students at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, held alongside filmmaker and fellow researcher Khristine Gillard
Invitation of Pr. Nina Lykke author of Vibrant Death for a performance-lecture during the Articulate Festival at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp
Memento Mori: The Dead Body in Art and Science, panel discussion
University of Antwerp
“ART, SCIENCE AND THE DECEASED BODY: TOWARDS A DUTY OF CARE”
talk and exhibition, KZN museum, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa
Visions for Crossing Gatherings
With Florence Cheval, Fiona Hallinan, Catalina Insignares, Julie Rodeyns and Hoda Siahtiri
As part of the research, a series of intimate gatherings were held at Zinnema in Brussels with a group of artists / researchers concerned with end-of-life care aesthetics and embodiment. The group met as a supportive network to share and experience each other’s practices and collectively reflect upon common questions.
Playing Dead
Work in progress
Playing Dead is an embodiment workshop on mortuary care stemming from field research and experience. It will offer an opportunity to rehearse gestures of deathcare in an environment centered around presence, consent and transparency with a slow, poetic and informative approach. The workshop is being conceived through a feminist pedagogy lens with guidance from somatic practitioners informed by psychotraumatology as well as nurses in palliative care and alternative funeral directors.