Good Mourning: Healing, Process, And The Affective Community Of Bodies
by Małgorzata Ludwisiak (text), Angelique Culvin (photo)
Imagine a utopian place where adults and children, Black, white, Asian and Latino, are singing, dancing, practising yoga, listening to lectures on trauma, performing and painting all together in one space filled with joy, enthusiasm and the enthralling sounds of music.
This is exactly how Nicole Rafiki imagined a mourning process. A good mourning. Moreover, she made the process happen, as a series of collective workshops under the title Good Mourning and the umbrella of Rafiki Art Initiatives (RAI) in the summer of 2020 in Oslo, as a response to George Floyd’s murder by a police officer and its aftermath. The project was hosted by an artist-run gallery, Kunstplass Contemporary, and its continuation is being planned at the Intercultural Museum, Oslo in 2021, for the decennial of the twin terror attacks in Norway on 22 July 2011.
Rafiki's role in the process was fluid. Being the initiator, she opened her personal mourning process to outsiders, shared her original curatorial and artistic concept of engaging art in the therapeutic process with the other invited artists, participants who signed up for a workshop lasting several days, and those who happened to stop by while passing the gallery. An individual set the process in motion and the temporary collective embraced it, developed, owned, and shared it.
During the course of the project, Rafiki adapted to the needs of the project, going from being a mediator, assistant, participant, director, co-curator, host, etc. This modest, ephemeral and nomadic project initiated by Nicole Rafiki, a Norwegian curator and artist of Congolese descent, seems to hold revolutionary potential, challenging both the Western notion of art and its institutional model, opening up new, mutually intertwined ways for their future transformation.
Mourning, deep grief after a traumatic loss, are recognised within the project, on the one hand, as universal, and on the other, as daily our experience and contemporary condition. In the collapse of political and economic systems, social unrest, institutionalised violence or terrorist attacks – all of them accelerated by the pandemic and multiplied by the digital infosphere – it seems we are all subject to collective mental breakdown. Rafiki invites us to confront and acknowledge this state of affairs from the very title, by extending our daily routine of greeting a friend or a stranger at the opening of a day with mutual good morning wishes.
The title, however, offers also a promise: that your mourning will find closure, a promise of healing. This takes us to Rafiki´s traditional and artistic and curatorial foundation in various African practices, particularly the Luba* notion of the intersecting roles of art, the conservation of collective memory, and healing.
Traditional healers in different communities on the African continent play a pivotal role in many spheres of people’s lives, serving ‘important roles as educators about traditional culture, cosmology and spirituality (…), as counselors, social workers, and skilled psychotherapist. Unlike in the Western atomized societies and treatment, isolating a sick individual from the group, in traditional healing practices an individual is never detached from a local community: when an individual is traumatised, so is the group, and it is also the group who brings about his or her healing.
“In traditional healing practices an individual is never detached from a local community: When an individual is traumatised, so is the group, and it is also the group who brings about his or her healing.”
With the Good Mourning project, Nicole Rafiki has established a temporary, affective collective, a special community of neighbours, contingent spectators, artists, singers, Black and white participants, immigrants, and Norwegians. Heterogeneous bodies performing spontaneous choreographies in the same space, defined by triple hospitality: the artists-run Kunstplass Contemporary gallery hosted Rafiki Art Initiatives, which hosted artists and workshop participants.
Both traditional healers and Western medical doctors agree that traumatic experiences inhabit our bodies, becoming a part of its gestures. Reorganising the choreography of a body can be a liberating process. When entering the workshop space, one was prompted by a statement: ‘please, enjoy the art, be the art’. Interestingly, no art objects, in a museum sense, were to be found there at any point in the whole process.
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.
The name of the umbrella project – Rafiki Art Initiatives – holds a similar promise. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, ‘to initiate’ means ‘to cause something to begin’ and ‘to teach someone an area of knowledge, or to allow someone into a group by a special ceremony’. The Oxford Learners’ Dictionary adds: ‘to introduce somebody to a particular skill or activity, especially a difficult one; to make somebody a member of a particular group’ and defines an initiative as ‘the ability to decide and act on your own without waiting for somebody to tell you what to do’, among other meanings. A close reading of these definitions, obvious as they may seem, brings us to a better understanding of the multiple dynamics of the project based on sharing, caring and inclusiveness.
“Without a permanent space to inhabit, reliant on the collaboration and hospitality of other institutions, it reflects both the homeless status of an immigrant and the rootless status of our contemporary culture.”
With the first public appearance of Good Mourning and the Rafiki Art Initiatives, Nicole Rafiki makes a serious and independent statement which should not be overlooked. She chooses a non-Western processual methodology and understanding of art and successfully mediates it in a healing process with a Western (a non-Western) ephemeral collective. Even more importantly, she turns this methodology into a hybrid non-institution, a non-place, a delicate, precarious, and nomadic structure which is Rafiki Art Initiatives. Without a permanent space to inhabit, reliant on the collaboration and hospitality of other institutions, it reflects both the homeless status of an immigrant and the rootless status of our contemporary culture.
As such, RAI seems to embody Achile Mbembe’s postulate to establish an ‘anti-museum’ that would not be an institution, but a symbol of an ‘other-place’. If he is correct that a Western art institution with its colonial past and object-centred model, freezes and neutralises the flow of life-forces and recalls the logic of segregation via monumentalisation processes, mummification and fetishisation, Nicole Rafiki offers true healing: a collective-based performative, process-centred non-structure. And if Alain Badiou was right in his ontology of the (marginal) event and its transformational power to change the present situation, there might be a lot to learn from Rafiki to change the Western artistic and institutional landscape, to make it stay relevant and responsive to contemporary traumas to which we are all more or less subject.
We are constantly between nowhere and evidently somewhere; our lives are shaped by language and how we use it or don’t and marred by consistently inconsistent quantities which are weighed up as being too much or not quite enough as we exist in contexts where we are labeled as minorities. As we tread the path to creating a language and, by ripple effect, conditions that best suit us, can we look at the beauty that can be found in the poetry of our mother tongues? I ponder this pursuit as there are elements of these languages that cannot be translated, for the sentiment is so nuanced that it can only be felt and therefore not spoken.
We are creating something new, just like those before us and the ones that will come after us, as we acknowledge that our cultures are shifting, and they do so right in front of our eyes. We are the custodians of the now, arranging and archiving the moments that will be exhibited in our collective histories in years to come as we strive to make meaning from the Black, African, diasporic, Afropolitan and transnational and the plethora of words that await their ascent into the world.
*(Ba)Luba is an ethnic group indigenous to present-time DR Congo, with branches in neighboring Zambia and Angola
Malgorzata Ludwisiak, Ph.D. is an Independent art critic and curator, museum management expert, academic teacher and member of CIMAM board – Chair of the Scientific Committee.