Collective Reading Session #1: to attend to
28 January 2024
Some reflections by Staci Bu Shea
On Sunday evening, 29 January we gathered at Manifold Books for the first collective reading session to consider perceptions of time and qualities of attention during a crisis or acute stress. Reading about the situation in Palestine (from texts written in 2015 and 2002), and with the dire reality now in Gaza, the immense privilege to gather calmly around texts to read and talk together was elucidated. The intention was to oscillate between scales of experience, that individual death and grief is happening at the same time as this mass, violent death (and as Dagmar said, we’re not talking just death but, Destruction) and grief we cannot fathom, but it’s really too much within a short time to touch on the immensity of this. The necropolitical scene of genocide via colonial occupation or austerity of destiny-of-death by covid narrative for vulnerable populations are both examples of “deaths pulled from the future,” as Death Panel has described. The reality of these bad deaths fuel our activism.
We silently read “No Time to Mourn,” a section from Alice Rothchild’s “Condition Critical: Life and Death in Israel/Palestine,” which points us to the impossibility of engaging mental health of survivors on the ground during a siege. Rothchild documented her conversation with Dr. Yasser Abu Jamei, director of Gaza Community Mental Health Prorgamme, who described the severity of the situation for the people they help: how people have no other chance but to go on, that their desire for life inspires any chance to become productive in that moment. Yasser also said they wait a little bit before showing up to the surviving family after a traumatic death because it is simply too raw to touch. Rothchild only later found out via the organization’s website, not from her conversation with him, that Yasser himself had lost 28 members of his family in a single Israeli missile strike.
We then read the living memoir, long-form poem “A State of Siege” by Mahmoud Darwish out loud together, popcorn style, staying with the charged silence of pregnant pauses between stanzas. Sensitive already from my identity/legacy position to read him out loud, and then to do so was a whole other level of bearing witness to heartbreak and resistance. It took us an hour to read the poem as a group. I thought, when is this going to end? It hurts. That minuscule in comparison but real pain bringing tears to read and hear “the martyr is the daughter of a martyr who is the daughter of a martyr and her brother is a martyr and her sister is a martyr…” It is so fucked, you just want to get out of your skin completely. The very least we could do is read that entire thing and all of his stinging metaphors and refusal of status quo and fixity.
At some point in the evening, Flora brought up how challenging it is to even touch on death and grief because so many of us are not even thinking about our mortality [in the death phobic West]. It’s not far fetch to say that death phobia leads to more harm and suffering. Again, the individual and collective is different but inextricably tied.
Pretty exhausted, we then briefly touched on individual but interdependent experience, absent of violence and ill intent though grief-ridden and painful nonetheless, through Moosje Moti Goosen’s text about the long arc of time being a stone before becoming alive. To me, the key event in the text is that eventually the author, as a stone, exercised a willfulness to transform into cell matter so that they could finally become alive in order to be able to die. As a group we reflected about the many perspectives and symbols of the stone, and returned to the symbolic gesture of stone-throwing by Palestinians.
In closing, no matter what situation you are in, especially one that you do not choose, there are much fewer choices but there are still choices and you (we) have to decide what to do next, moment by moment. Now how do you carry this over into non-crisis moments, when you are privileged to not have to deal with what others are dying from? A deeply lived life might simply mean that you get serious about what it means to still be alive, and strive to be as life-affirming as possible in the face of all you will lose. In this respect, in closing the session, I asked the group (and myself) to think about how we slow down time, listen to the signals of the body to illuminate a need or boundary, and to consider what it is that we know we must do, in our aliveness, however small, that we can no longer defer. Different forms of BDS, for example, and a refusal to normalcy.
At the start of the session, I created a salt water bowl to hold any excess grief that the group itself couldn’t hold. This salt water bowl (pictured, photo by @katjamater) will be present for all collective reading sessions at Manifold this year. Each session will also close with some shared food, a bowl of salt, fat, water and heat :) This time we had pasta and fava bean soup (1992 vintage Martha Steward recipe) and shared bread. Many thanks to all who participated and for minimizing risk of covid by wearing masks.
The Sphinx’s Riddle #2 at Manifold Books, Amsterdam
Collective Reading Session #2: to dedicate to with Katja Mater
9 March 2024
Some reflections by Staci Bu Shea
The second collective reading session took place on Saturday, 9 March within the installation of Katja Mater’s two-channel 16mm film When Things Fall Apart. To start, we experienced the film and its oscillating projectors, in case any participants hadn’t yet. This way we could begin on the same page and find clarity in our conversation through Katja’s work.
The water from our salt water bowl inaugurated from the first reading session had evaporated, so we filled it back up. This bowl, filled with saltiness like that of tears or the ocean (the beginning of all life), is a tool for us to gather any grief that can’t be held by any one person or even the group. Any conversation of one grief brings up another grief, so with acknowledgement of this in the beginning, we practiced what it can mean to strengthen our ecology of the unseen by inviting folks to bring their dead into the room. Everyone's varied grief was welcome. We huddled around the bowl.
Katja began by reading from the book she made for the exhibition titled “Book of Dedications,” a collection of handwritten reproductions of dedication pages cut from the books in her mother’s library. Carla had an enormous book collection, and redistributing this library was one of the many projects undergone by Katja and her sister in the wake of Carla’s death. Cleaning out a loved one’s house is filled with numerous secondary losses, and Katja gave structure and time to being with Carla’s objects as a practice of holding on and letting go in the ripples of grief. Through the dedications she read, many more lives entered the room.
Katja shared about the inspiration for and process of making the film, the sorting through material layers of collage and sensing presence in the stacking of time that is also evident in the film's results. We spoke about the death and grief care I provided her during that time between the deaths of her father and mother, and Katja gave nuance to the different experiences of navigating sudden and gradual loss, how the latter provides an invaluable opportunity in presence and attention, and how inevitably both kinds present lessons to learn from that influence the process of grieving.
To consider the depth of our relationships, I read aloud the scene from Ocean Vuong’s novel of his grandma’s death, and we reflected on the use of color as a way to time travel in the present – the intensity of his grandmother's purple feet and the thrilling memory of grabbing purple flowers with her next to a highway. Senses and perception through materials demonstrate how memories live in the present.
With Anastasia’s consent, I braided a segment of her hair to model the neurological entanglement of time, space and attachment that we have to others in our life. When they die (or are separated from us), that braid unravels and the quality of that unraveling has to do with the quality of connection. We learn slowly to rebraid the connection again in time and relation to reality to nourish our continuous bond.
We explored more memories, associations and reflections through the work of Etel Adnan. We passed around the last book she wrote, Shifting the Silence, my most favorite reflection on aging and death. Adnan’s thoughts and feelings were read aloud by the participants, as we passed around the book and flipped to any random page to read/listen to a segment. A play with nonlinearity.
To close, Maartje read a short paragraph from the thesis of Moosje Moti Goosen, a note on the aliveness of writing and reading through recognition of the cycle of breath taken while writing and reading it. Then we gathered in silent procession with Jellichje Reijnders, outside to an open grassy area surrounded by large trees and nestled between buildings. Jellichje led us through a series of qigong movements to help us integrate our conversation in the body, with focus on our aliveness through "being-breath.”
We gathered over potato-leek soup (thanks for your help Matevž!), inspired by a recipe from Carla’s recipe book given to Katja and her sister, and for a twist I made a dill gremolata. Katja brought old goat cheese and candied orange peels (made by her friend Matilda) so we could time travel to her taste buds while she was in the immediate throes of grief.
Many thanks to the participants who came. Jellichje told me later that when she entered the room, it looked like we were all connected as one breathing body. <3 This photo shows the salt water bowl in its current state. The evaporation process in the last months caused a capillary action of the salt to continuously extend itself along the support of the bowl and saucer, kind of like how the wick of a candle pulls up the flame. Filling the bowl up again with water is like lighting a candle that had burnt out, a gesture related to our continuation.
The Sphinx’s Riddle at Manifold Books, Amsterdam
Collective Reading Session #3: to attest to with Dagmar Bosma
1 June 2024
Some reflections by Staci Bu Shea
We gathered for the third collective reading session on Saturday, 1 June within the exhibition Tough and Tender by Dagmar Bosma. From a trans-centered perspective, our time together focused on the many transformations throughout a lifetime, the complex process of the endocrine system, and culturally and materially informed perceptions about aging and plasticity.
Our salt bowl (and saucer, pictured here) was now completely enveloped with salt by the last session’s water evaporation. This time it carried our reading and conversation around instances of ambiguous loss, the kind that doesn't involve emotional closure or clear understanding, usually cultivated within a temporary threshold (no longer here but not quite there) where resolve is often met with a struggle of agency. Grieving can become disenfranchised when the particular grief is not recognized or we don’t get enough support that it’s legitimate. To that end, it felt really important to acknowledge the ongoing genocide and ecocide in Gaza and elsewhere during our introduction. There’s actually too much of a dissonance for many of us to gather without doing so.
Dagmar introduced the waiting list indication for gender affirming care from UMC’s website. They passed around copies of this document (in the second photo) where they had imprinted a large antique iron key by way of oxide transfer. We discussed the document’s bureaucratic language, the itemized and categorized list, and the quantified medicalization of gender and institutional gatekeeping. Dagmar noted that the word for regret (betreuren) in “we regret that we cannot help you more quickly at this time” is also another way of saying “mourn.” Waiting is latent with grief.
As one of the book editions for the show, Dagmar rust-dyed Herculine Barbin’s memoirs. During the reading session we passed his personal copy around, taking turns reading from any page and taking guidance from Dagmar’s underlined passages. Here we noted the entanglement of institutionalized heteronormativity. Herculine was an intersex person socialized as female, living in a convent in the 19th century, and was institutionally forced to the male gender because of her homosexuality. We embodied and listened to her passionate character aloud, sensing her power, sensuality and spiritual enlightenment.
We then took fifteen minutes or so to read a segment from J. Logan Smilges’s chapter “Disidentifying Silence” about old and aging trans and gender nonconforming people and silence as an antidote to the transnaturalist timeline from one gender to another authentic and complete one. Of special interest to me, Smilges opens the chapter with a question about trans and disabled embodiment of dementia. Mitch, a participant of the photoenthographic project “To Survive on This Shore,” asks “what if I forget if I am trans?” We discussed and then closed out this segment with two from our group reading aloud Smilges’s closing paragraphs. If Mitch does forget, “then silence will be waiting to catch him, to hold him, to keep him in a realm of gender nonconformance that isn’t perfect or necessarily what he wants but might be just enough to keep alive, to keep him out of the ground, suspended by a gender that doesn’t have a name.”
Dagmar invited artist Huub Kooijman (us around him in the third photo) to share a reading of his work drawn from his high school agendas. Like with Herculine, we were back to the felt and intimate experience of someone’s story and this time playful with references relatable to those of us born in the 80s/90s and a seriousness that is universal. While passing around and looking into his old agenda, Huub shared anecdotes and details of puberty, the almost unbearable lightness of profundity experienced as a teenager, from novel discovery and sprouts of hair to awkwardness and disproportionate bodily growth. He wove encounters with his father’s ALS and frontotemporal dementia diagnosis, which I couldn’t help but revere as an invaluable practice of writing grief as a way of making sense of our ongoing relationships even after loss.
Afterwards we ate a vegan Portuguese caldo verde. Instead of chorizo, I infused sun dried tomatoes with liquid smoke and soy sauce, and instead of collards we had Lacinato kale partly harvested from Maartje’s balcony. Perfect summer soup and to hold us after the session. Many thanks to the participants who came. And special thanks to Seon for their help in the last steps of cooking.
The Sphinx’s Riddle at Manifold Books, Amsterdam
Collective Reading Session #4: to remember for with Philipp Gufler and the Paul Hoecker Research Group
5 October 2024
Some reflections by Staci Bu Shea
“We are learning to live with death, with the dead, we are learning with the life of our death in us, to live with cats, with mother, with envelopes, with secrets, to live each instant, we are learning to live, we are learning but we don’t know.” - Hélène Cixous
The fourth collective reading session took place on Saturday, 5 October within the exhibition Remembering Paul by the Paul Hoecker Research Group, with works by Paul Hoecker and Philipp Gufler.
The direction of this session was to focus on the grief that’s laden in desire and longing, and to think about ancestors and memorialization, beginning with Paul Hoecker and the research group and then branching out in an associative, heart-led way. Still, we kept coming back to Hoecker and the affinity group built around him in his legacy. The process of initiating and searching for the life of the largely forgotten queer artist is reparative, and the research group gives new perspectives on what a collective, intergenerational biographical practice can be and look like for artists, historians, archivists, and enthusiasts. It’s inspiring. We read two documents related to Hoecker: his opaque but respectful resignation letter which bears no detail of the cause of his resignation (the scandal of his alleged male sex worker model for his “Madonna”). We read a personal letter to Hoecker by research group member Christina Spachtholz that details the substance of her allurement to him and his work, which contrasts a more scholarly approach but is all the while always the hidden heart behind anyone devoting their energy in researching a figure! The research group contributes such rich material that gives body to the exhibition that in a way oscillates between these two very different documents.
We kept coming back to what is kept and hidden, especially with the support of Hélène Cixous’ text, which we all generally felt a lot of pleasure in reading, doing so quietly as a group, each one invited to read out a line if it resonated for them. It was refreshing, like a spa of the brain, to sense unapologetically that love and joy is evident in grief and sorrow. Cixous’ poetic, painterly-like writing on love, identification and belonging expressed through the impulse to collect and cherish objects gave a lot of space for the power of intuition over cognition. “Everything you touch is you,” “The mixture of sacred and non sacred paper of all kinds happens naturally,” and “The essential thing to living is that the secret be (1) well-balanced and well-managed (2) well-kept.” A moment of respite and hope in a world that is not making much sense. To be with simple truths, and to acknowledge that what we orient towards is an expression of what matters to us, and what matters to us can change our orientation if we really listen.
Lastly, in considering intergenerational, collective grief and the persistence of queer life, we read Manifest by Trish Salah, an important figure in trans studies, whose poems layer personal grief with current political violences to explore the paradox of a love that prevails amidst brutality. As well as Pulse by John Keene, a loving remembrance poem in honor of those murdered in the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida.
Our salt bowl (and saucer), serving as our personal and collective grief collector, remains encased in salt. As always, we wrapped up the session with vegan soup, this time borscht with yogurt and dill, to get back into and warm the body. Thanks to all who attended in both mind and heart.
23/11: to pass on with Natalia Papaeva, hosted by Anna Arov
29/03: to live through with Moosje Moti Goosen