"Queering Grief" Syllabus
Every year, Level Ground residents curate their own syllabus to reflect the critical, creative, and imaginative foundations of their residency work. Reflecting their residency show BATH, the focus of 2022 resident artist Leo Alas’s “Queering Grief” syllabus is around love, trauma, and the body.
Curator’s Note:
The syllabus begins with bell hooks as a basis for community care that revolves around a love ethic. I follow up with The Queer Art of Failure because it is a framework I return to in my art making-- partially in reverence of "subjugated knowledge" (a la Michel Foucault) and partially an aesthetic decision to fail often and well. From there, the syllabus contains various relationships to grief including death, disability, trauma, and political disenfranchisement.
I am interested in grief as a way to move through transitions and the experiences of injustice; and especially in what an embodiment of grief looks like. This leads me to highlight, in a serious way, Moonlight (2016) for its scenes that show Chiron immersing in water, in his sink, in the ocean — and in a less serious way, ASMR research for it's exploration of the sensations that come with pleasing sounds, our relationship to others, and the virtual experience of care. Items #11, 13, and 14 on the syllabus are primarily interested in the greater experience of grief and how it exists in a larger liberatory battle. —Leo Alas
1. All About Love by bell hooks (in particular Chapter 6: “Values: Living by a Love Ethic”) (Book, 272 pages)
2. The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam (in particular “Introduction: Low Theory”) (Book, 224 pages)
The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives.
3. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk (Book, 464 pages)
A pioneering researcher and one of the world’s foremost experts on traumatic stress offers a bold new paradigm for healing.
4. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzma-Samarhasinha (Book, 304 pages)
Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of color are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a tool kit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind.
5. How To Live When A Loved One Dies by Su Co Dang Nghiem (Talk, 1:18:10)
6. Mahal Kita by Hikes (Album)
Born out of true friendship and an aptitude for healthy catharsis, Austin’s Hikes anchored by the technical, emotive songwriting of Filipinx naturalist Nay Wilkins honors the love found in tight communities. Hikes’ newest full length, 'Mahal Kita,' is the Tagalog term for “I Love You.” As Nay’s mother’s native language, the album is dedicated to the unrelenting will to make it through trauma while retaining the empathy and compassion that Nay learned from their Mother, and how Hikes is the vessel for implementing those ideals.
7. One Big Bag by Every Ocean Hughes (Installation, Studio Voltaire, London)
One Big Bag centres on a Millennial death doula and the items in her ‘mobile corpse kit’. The immersive film installation asks vital practical, political and poetic questions contributing to a necessary and growing debate around end–of–life practices.
8. The Water(s) by Mick Jenkins (Album, 57:42)
9. Moonlight directed by Barry Jenkins (Film, stream on Hulu)
10. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande (Book, 304 pages)
11. What Does An Uprising Doula Do? edited by Abdul-Aliy A Muhammad + Pato Herbert (Zine, 65 pages)
12. It Feels Good to be Measured: Clinical role-play, Walker Percy, and the tingles by Nitin K Ahuja (Article, 9 pages)
13. Mourning and Militancy by Douglas Crimp (Essay, 23 pages)
14. I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World by Kai Cheng Thom (Book, 144 pages)