Unruly Studies: Befriending Finitude

Befriending Finitude | Laboratory by Cristina Maldonado

A laboratory focused on the performativity of death in the everyday.

• When: Mon-Fri, 31 Mar-4 Apr, 2:30pm-6:30pm

• Where: Espaço AND Lab

• Capacity: 12 participants

• Language: English/Spanish

• Value: €60 | €40 with scholarship In AND Lab activities, we offer scholarships to: racialized people; people with disabilities and/or other dissident bodies; LGBTQIA+ people; people affected by gender and/or social class inequalities; unemployed people; migrants; refugees. To apply for a scholarship, fill out the application form indicating your interest and explaining your motivation for the request. We will review your application and contact you to inform you of the outcome.

The format of 'Unruly Studies' makes this workshop move from the School of Reparar Programme to nestle in our Common Doing. It remains an unfolding activity but this time in "relationship with". Thus, it is an activity curated by AND Lab but guided by an external proponent, invited because we recognize the potential to expand these studies, both for our nutrition, as a team-collective, and for yours, as a public-network.

Befriending Finitude researches and facilitates intimacy with the life-death cycle. As a result of a 4-year-long, ongoing artistic research, it explores how we ‘do’ death.

Focusing on how imagination, creativity, performance and symbols can contribute to our awareness of different aspects of dying, the artist, together with others, will investigate–through collective actions and gifts–which processes we can reappropriate to foster a healthier relationship with finitude.

Each day, we will be immersed in an existing outcome of this artistic research, ranging from games and audiovisual experiences to performative writing and mapping. All of these outcomes are designed to help you acknowledge your feelings and thoughts, and to formulate your own questions around finitude. After each experience, we will reflect on it and discuss how art can become a tool to support various processes related to dying, whether in education, palliative care, funeral practices, or commemoration. Following the collective reflection, each participant will design a toolkit of simple practices that can be applied to themselves or others in their particular context. The laboratory is led by an artist, not a therapist. It is not a grief counseling session or group therapy. I do not recommend attending if you have experienced a recent loss, unless you are receiving psychological support and your therapist has recommended it. Befriending Finitude is open to the general public, as well as to professionals dealing with the topic of death in their respective practices.

Cristina Maldonado

More about Cristina Maldonado and this work:

https://cristinamaldonado.com/one-to-one/

https://www.in-situ.info/infinite-game_epistolary-recount

https://thestrangergetsagift.com/portfolio/uncategorized/we-do-not-remember-alone-2020/

https://www.in-situ.info/narratives/death-on-paper

https://thestrangergetsagift.com/portfolio/research/invisible-bonds-2021-2024/

https://www.in-situ.info/narratives/to-plant-a-person