Good Mo[u]rning
Intercultural Museum / Kunstplass Contemporary, Oslo
Both public performance and participatory art project, Good Mourning means to create the space necessary to explore the various and winding stages of grief, survivor’s guilt, and healing by utilizing art as a tool.
This project finds strong roots in the Congolese Matanga mourning tradition and its gathering together of mourners from all walks of life and social standings to grieve, mourn, and heal in community. Collective loss is transmuted into collective healing, a union of grief.
Good Mourning endeavours to make art a central process and tool of communal grieving and healing space.
The first Good Mourning in 2020 took place in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, and the global protests against racialized police violence and anti-blackness, that saw tens of thousands of protestors on the streets of Norway in the first weeks of June. The second deliberately coincided with the tenth anniversary of the Utøya and Oslo terrorist attacks, June 22, 2021.
Artist-led workshops and community space created structure for the project in 2020 and 2021, and the public, local youth in the Grønland neighborhood of Oslo, and professional artists participated together in the creation of pieces of art that were exhibited at Kunstplass in Oslo in 2021, and will continue to be shown throughout Norway in the time ahead.
Participating artists and creatives:
Marie Cole
David Obi
Partner institutions:
We thank everyone who participated, supported and made these events so memorable!
What Rafiki did was to trigger the motion of a collective of bodies, to provoke their performative interactions, allowing the participants to release bodily tension and regain a sense of community. It is possible, but not necessary to produce an object in this processual and transcendental approach, within which a collective is both subject and object of the actions. This way, the very notion of art has been extended to signify a long-lasting, community-oriented therapeutic process.
Photo: Angelique Culvin
