Grief Archive is a project of the commonplace collective, a group of artists currently from the so-called United States (aka, part of Turtle Island), Ireland and Spain. Grief has served as a driving force for connecting and moving towards collaborating together. Our experiences of loss are thus a container from which to generate life. This website will serve as an archive for research, projects (finished and works in progress), etc.

Through our collective work, we will research on the activation of art practices as a way to claim and reimagine communal grief and to fight the systemic deprivation and trauma caused by capitalism and colonialism. Our aim is to build upon a politics of care and bolster anticapitalist ways to attend to life and grief while questioning the colonial perception of space and time and how this has affected our rituals of loss and suffering. As the pandemic and oppressive systems are global in nature, we are excited about the opportunity to share space, across borders and oceans, around our shared, yet unique, experiences of grief. We are deeply curious about how our different cultural backgrounds shape the ways we grieve and the stories we associate with this aspect of life. We are actively looking into our roots and asking what that means in a broader and profound sense, from human ancestry to the land we inhabit.

We are interested in experiences regarding the loss of places from both a personal, ancestral and environmental perspective and how this can have a major impact on our identity and sense of belonging.

We embrace a culture of collaboration as a way of moving away from the artist as a single author in isolation and aim to relate this to the process of grief, exploring the possibilities and advantages of a communal practice.

Our first tentative questions are the following: How can we co-create spaces (both in person and online) for communal grief through art practices? How can we connect our individual experiences of grief with communal, societal and environmental grief and that of colonisation? To answer these questions and those which may emerge, we plan to go about our research on two different levels: From a theoretical approach, conducting formal research on the subject, and also by hosting informal discussions around the topics mentioned above. On a practical level, through open creative labs where we can experiment together with any and all who are interested.

Motivation

As painful as grief is, we recognize it as evidence of love; and as difficult as it can be to experience joy without succumbing to guilt, we affirm that allowing ourselves to experience joy together is liberating and revolutionary. Grounding our work in grief allows us to create strength out of being vulnerable, connecting and building together on deeper levels.

As an international community we can appreciate the collective experience and considerations of our own different backgrounds and the unique yet common experiences of grief across place. Borrowing from our ancestral community-based rituals surrounding loss we wish to create space for the expression and anticipation of grief through creative practice.

The four founding artists in the collective met through participating in the 2021 Cohort of the IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) Arts and Politics Summer School, when they realized they all had an interest in exploring grief through art. We plan to continue organizing events and collaborating on research and art practice. We welcome you to get in touch about joining and/or potential collaborations!