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photos: Emma Spannenberg

 

Curating Grief

a recap of the artist talk with Staci Bu Shea (Oct 18, 2024)

by Alica Plulíková

Nov 1, 2024

 

 

Before we start codifying thoughts and feelings into language, Staci Bu Shea invites us to engage in a small ritual. They guide us through a breathwork practice, where we are encouraged to build awareness of the current systems which are in place right now, working gently and rhythmically to keep us alive. As we close our eyes and become aware of the air circling in, through, and out of our bodies, Staci describes our exhale as a small universe → a symbol of our interconnectedness.

 

With this framework of awareness set out for us, we continue listening to Staci in their descriptions of their current practices.Beginning with introducing the concept of “reparations” as a practice, and distinguish between dealing with

•    material reparations

        and

•    spiritual reparations

 

The practice of spiritual reparations is something which they are currently engaging in, and trying to facilitate for people. This engagement is something that came about intuitively. On their daily walk to work, they used to walk past a hospice, and often felt a strong sense of needing to engage with this facility. However, the final push that eventually led them to take this step, was a breakup, and the subsequent grief that resulted from it.  So, they slowly began volunteering at this facility which provides · education, ᐧ support,  and  · guidance, for the dying. And fully committing to this practice from 2021.

Next to this lived experience at the hospice, Staci continued their practice of working with text. They find that writing and language is a great way of walking into the heart of experience and sharing it with others. Through writing, we are able to find details and describe and codify sensory experience, and subsequently, collectively share it with one another.

 

Language and writing can also be an interesting way of moving between the political and the personal. An example of this would be their writing on the gas extraction in the north of the Netherlands* and the results that stem from this, both in the effects on human & non-human animals and the land on which these beings are situated. (* Staci was invited by het resort to write for the publication of S06E01: ‘Slochteren grief diary’)

This writing is also concerned with the idea of collective grief. Staci introduces us to this concept and contrasts it to individual grief.  Claiming that these phenomenons differ in their structure, and therefore, have to be dealt with differently. While individual grief has to be met individually and very often (but not always) involves “slow dying”, collective grief has to be dealt with collectively and requires a realisation by an individual, regarding the systems and structures that they are embedded in. In Staci’s words, collective grief involves the realisation that you, as an individual, are “a stitch in a fabric in some way”.

 

Staci mentions the various narratives concerning death that we are met with in modern society. On the one hand, we are met with a fear of death on an individual level, where people, through the established practice of hospitals, die and are buried alone, detached from community and land, and on the other, we are met with a constant exposure to tragic deaths on a mass scale such as the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. Both of these narratives are tragic and far from both individual and collective progress.

Staci believes that next to violence and tragedy, there is the possibility of care. By living, we find attachment to each other. Slow healing finds equivalence in slow violence, but the roots for progress can only be found by encounters that come from having our fingers in the dirt.

 

 

 

 

about

Alica Plulíková (2000, Slovakia), performance artist and painter, graduated bachelor Arts, Culture and Media, currently working on a pre-master in Philosophy.

 

Staci Bu Shea (b. Miami, 1988) is a curator, writer, and death doula based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Broadly, Bu Shea convenes with others over aesthetic, critical, and poetic practices of social reproduction and care work, as well as its manifestations in interpersonal relationships, daily life, community organizing, and institutional practice.

Bu Shea’s debut publication Dying Livingly is released in November 2024 with Sternberg Press as part of the Solution Series edited by Ingo Niermann. Bu Shea was curator at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons (Utrecht, 2017-2022) and cocurated Barbara Hammer: Evidentiary Bodies at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (New York, 2017). Bu Shea holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, 2016).

stacibushea.info   stacibushea.care

 

 

studium resort is made possible by Pictoright Fund