The Mourning Sociality is a space where mourning is an expression of love for what has been lost. 'A space that praises the grooves of our skin that have become valleys full of loss, anger, grief, and hysterical humor. The intention for this gathering is to collectively practice loving and honouring our broken hearts and resilience in togetherness. It is a space where tears are received with embracing hands, where wailing is encouraged by other trembling voices, and where you can lament our suffering with the help of the proximity of other bodies so that you do not suffer in stillness or loneliness.'
This Mourning Sociality centers around the deep sweet sorrow that comes with the violence of the colonial past and present. Through the public act of moaning together in the "VOC-zaal", the group will aim to infiltrate the walls, floor and artefacts with wild and honourable grief. Everyone is welcome to participate in this communal moment, but due to limited capacity, reservations are necessary. Read on for more information on what to expect.
The session will begin by setting up an altar with objects, drawings, or mourning stories. For the mourning altar, Raoni invites you to bring a photo, drawing or name of someone or something you want to praise. Raoni will propose the technique of moaning through embodied exercises. Then you will delve into a collective moan session and end the process with a grounding exercise.
At the end of the session, there will be tea and snacks. There will be time to reflect on how the experience was collectively and individually. Raoni offers this exercise because he believes that regaining a sensorial relationship to our own voices, and those of others, is extremely essential for crafting otherly worlds. In his experience, the broad spectrum of moaning unleashes our emotions, our imaginative minds, our sensuality, and our sense of solidarity and sets them in motion. This collective event does not require participants to have experience with voice and body exercises; your curiosity is the driving force.
Raoni Muzho Saleh (1991 AFG/NL) is a choreographer/performer based in Amsterdam. He graduated from University of Amsterdam in 2015, bachelor in Literary and Cultural Analysis. In 2019 he graduated from School for New Dance Development, a bachelor in Choreography. His work is influenced by fugitivity, a revolutionary movement that shapes his artistic vision. By dancing through the gender spectrum, Raoni has developed a unique movement practice that emphasises “becoming other”, a continuous state of incompleteness. Through the use of materials such as textile, dough, voice, and text, Raoni invites a serious kind of play into space where all can become immersed in otherworldly stories. His intimate relationship with the materiality of artistic practice allows for a continuous negotiation of a queer becoming.