with Carol Zou

Carol Zou: The first question is the most obvious one: why grief? What motivates you to investigate this topic, what is the praxis or ethical stance that you’ve developed around this investigation, and what have you learned?

LEO ALAS: I started exploring grief after my friend, Tinsley, passed away early in the pandemic. They were living in Kentucky at the time and all of my friends who knew them were scattered around the country. We met over zoom for Tinsley’s memorial and it was my first exposure to community grief in a virtual space. I hate to say that it was a fairly uncomfortable experience and I was realizing that my group of friends and I didn’t really know how to grieve together even though we all desperately wanted to. One of my friends, Colleen, came into the memorial later and Colleen is a brilliant facilitator– she was able to tug at invisible strings to get us to start to share what we needed to share and release what we needed releasing. I took on my first few grief related projects with Colleen as a collaborator because her intuition astounded me so much. I wanted to learn from her. 

Another major inspiration was my dad. He is a nurse and spent the entirety of 2020 on a COVID floor, working close to 80 hour work weeks. I saw the way his job was affecting him and our family– it upset me to see that he had no resources to manage the emotional stress while all the while the world proclaimed thanks to “essential workers.” But even before my dad became a nurse, I have been continuously inspired by him and his way of stepping up when it seems like others are apprehensive and afraid– especially with matters concerning death, sickness, and disability. To me, my dad has always been intuitively a care worker. We speak about this in his interview in the zine. 

“My thoughts now are that grief spaces must be diverse in type of care and easy to find and access.”

I see grief work as an extremely needed form of community care, that touches so many of our lives, and yet very few people have that intuitive sense to perform that kind of care. I think I am one of those people… It is an intimidating subject to dive into! My exploration was based on a curiosity around people like my dad or Colleen who have the skill naturally, or people who are thrust into situations to be care workers and have to learn what it means as they are doing it. A big motivator for the project is to acknowledge this invisible labor that people do every day for their communities without necessarily being grief workers by profession.

I learned many things in the process that have shaped my stance around grief work. Firstly, I was in awe just by how many people responded to my call for interviews, and in my past zine, my call for survey responses and focus groups. It became extremely obvious to me that people deeply desire a platform to speak about their grief. Secondly, I noticed how many people felt these spaces don’t exist or that the institutions around them don’t care for their grief– people told me about situations at schools, hospitals, workplaces, etc. that demanded from them a rapid “back to normal” following great losses in their life. (Not unlike the political push to go “back to normal” despite an ongoing global pandemic.) As much as I am interested in interpersonal tools to navigate grief, it is apparent that there are major cultural shifts that need to take place in order to meet people’s needs. 

Third, and this is obvious, everyone responds to grief differently and has different needs in their grief care.  While I was investigating, I kept wondering in the back of my mind what the best thing to do to respond to someone when I hear they experienced a loss– what questions to ask, what help to offer... Ultimately, there is no best thing. What is impactful for one person, could be agonizing for another. My thoughts now are that grief spaces must be diverse in type of care and easy to find and access. 

Which leads me to another pressing thought I have come to– grief care has a strong potential to be anti-capitalist work. The things grief demands of our bodies and our minds are so strongly antithetical to the capitalist work ethic and drive towards productivity. Grief work empowers those of us who are most likely to be pushed to the margins– people targeted by state violence, people working paycheck to paycheck, disabled folk, the elderly, incarcerated folk and their families, people targeted by sexual and gendered violence, etc. In a very literal sense, where capitalism demands we move towards growth, it can be a radical act to linger in loss. 

CZ: What is the relationship between the interviews that you conducted and your object making? How do the objects and collaborative rituals that you create become containers, vessels, catalysts for this investigation into grief? 

LA: Much of my work draws from bathroom aesthetics and other modes of moving water. The elements of the show that were mainly my own were the ceramic fountain pieces and the work on the wall made of pvc pipes. I say mainly my own because, although I made and designed the objects, I drew inspiration from the interviews and considered each interviewee a conceptual collaborator. 

I am often working with bathroom imagery because I like the idea of taking something intimate and hidden and turning it into something public and on display. Grief feels similarly pushed aside culturally as a private matter, when it is so clearly something that every person will experience in their lifetime. The pipes on the walls were my way of pulling out hidden/unseen structures– similar to how there are so many hidden actors at play performing grief work. I placed the pipes over the tiles that would have, in a real bathroom space, hidden the pipes. I used paint pens and markers to draw on and graffiti the tiles as a way to reference the rebellious act of reclaiming a space and as a gesture towards a community story.

“My goal in my interviews was to put on a pedestal the knowledge that every day people have around grief care”

The ceramic fountain pieces were, exactly as you say, vessels for grief. I was experimenting with taking advice from the interviews and imagining what the advice would look like if it were a container for grief. As the pieces connected with tubing and into the ground fountain, I thought of it as a play on the “stages of grief,” in a tongue in cheek way as the water moving through the tubes were leaky and faulty and an overall mess. 

Lastly, I had collaborative pieces with Gray Hong of Moon Jar Design (moonjardesign.com), Genna Bloombecker of Clumsy World (clumsyworld.com), and Danny War. It was very important to me that the show very directly included my collaborators and their visions. Together we brainstormed a grief ritual based around the clementine. This was a reference to my interview with Gray where they offered the clementine as a grief tool because of its multiple sensory properties. Genna built upon this idea with a “fruit tree” meditation and Danny tied it together with poetry.Gray built floral installations in the room to complement the meditation activation. I saw Gray’s flowers as a visual shrine and an active death to take place for the duration of the show, as the flowers wilted and decayed. My goal in my interviews was to put on a pedestal the knowledge that every day people have around grief care and I wanted the show to be a platform or, as you put it, a container for that knowledge.

CZ: You conduct interviews with a range of people—not all of whom identify as queer or explicitly work with queer communities. What are the particularities of queer grief? How do the particularities of queer grief relate to the broader lens that is represented by the interviews?

I loosely, and potentially controversially, define Queerness mainly through a political lens. When dealing with emotional and traumatizing issues, there are designated experts who are considered qualified to help move people through transitions. Of course, these experts are often expensive and/or overbooked. I am interested in viewing knowledge horizontally, and to me, that is a Queer act– and an act that comes with many ethical considerations. By no means do I want to encourage people to behave recklessly and falsify knowledge or promise cures to the vulnerable and in need. But I do think that we deny ourselves an important skill set as a culture by offloading the responsibility of community care to experts. 

I define my work as Queer because it engages in political imagination and world building. I ask my interviewees what is missing in care around grief and ask them to envision creative solutions.

Of course, there is a serious reality that Queer people undergo a unique and particular kind of grief historically and in the present. Most obviously, the AIDS epidemic and vulnerability to violence and discrimination, but also loss of familial relationships and the grief that comes with shifting/transitioning identities. It is remarkable and powerful that Queer people have developed alternative ways of creating family, expressing gender, and loving in the face of it all. I wanted this voice present in the interviews. At the same time, I wanted to challenge people who may not share the experience of creating alternative ways of being to use their own experiences to think through what a world that valued grief care could look like. 

I am resistant to an identity politic that pushes me away from non-Queer people in my community. I am not alone in feeling this way, especially as a Queer person who is also a racial minority. Instead, I want to use the tools Queerness gives me to invite my communities to envision alternatives with me.
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