MERIAN PhD candidate Valentina Curandi (DAI, 2017) convened a reading group encouraging to explore how to read together about death and mourning. The group will read extracts from Vibrant Death. A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning (Bloomsbury 2022) by Nina Likke (Distinguished Professor, Gender Studies, Linköping University). The book chronicles the author's personal journey through mourning after the loss of her queer life partner, and into understanding the transformative force of death to shift human life into the inhuman. It aims to reframe mourning from a solitary individual experience to a communal practice. A series of soft sculptures by artist Maike Hemmers (DAI, 2017) are featured in the space of the Art-Science Lab. These colourful textile shapes, filled with pits and sheep wool, can connect to each other and to the human body to provide support and enhance internal physical perceptions. They are available during the group sessions for the readers to use and seek comfort while reading. Friday, 28 June, 2024 with Staci Bu Shea, art curator, writer and death doula. More sessions of "A Vibrant Death Reading Group" are coming up in autumn 2024. Click for more information.
The reading group is supported by Universiteitsfonds Limburg SWOL and MERIAN - the Maastricht Experimental Research In and through the Arts Network.
MERIAN
Taking the format of a PhD trajectory, MERIAN allows established artists and academics to engage in collaborative research in between making and thinking. Mobilizing the powers and fragilities of artistic and scientific practices, selected candidates engage in research that is problem-based, methodologically innovative, and focuses on interdisciplinary topics that can fruitfully be explored across the arts and academia. MERIAN is an institutional space for the development of new norms and forms of embodied knowledge. It renegotiates relationships between existing cultural and knowledge institutions and addresses urgent matters of societal concern.