Events
Feeling through Clay: Processing Collective Grief and Mourning
The Armory invites you to join artist Aroussiak Gabrielian, grief worker Resham Mantri, and choreographer Meagan Yellott in a clay workshop exploring collective grief and healing. Drawing on clay's therapeutic qualities, the workshop invites you to shape, mold, and transform clay to process the weight of the current moment, bearing witness to collective atrocities across the globe—from genocide to ecocide.
Participants will have the opportunity to contribute their clay creations to the artist’s installation. RSVPs are not required but are appreciated.
How can we physically feel our way through grief and mourning? What does it mean to be connected through shared matter in our grief and mourning?
Drawing on the inherently therapeutic qualities of clay as a medium, the workshop will explore, process, and express collective grief, mourning, atonement, and healing through embodied and tactile engagement with shared matter.
Through direct, hands-on, and non-verbal expression rooted in the senses, particularly touch, we will shape, mold, and transform clay as we process the weight of the current moment, bearing witness to collective atrocities across the globe - from genocide to ecocide.
We are interested in exploring the following questions and more:
How can we physically feel our way through grief and mourning? What does it mean to be connected through shared matter in our grief and mourning? What form can collective care take in the face of collective death? How do we love and accept the grieving body with all its adjustments, changes, and inflammations? How do we grieve and honor dying bodies during a genocide? What part of our inflammations are connected to collective death? How can working with shared matter like clay bring us back to working with the shared matter of our bodies? How does working with external matter extend to caring for external bodies beyond our own?
The workshop will be led by artist/educator/scholar Aroussiak Gabrielian, death doula/artist/writer Resham Mantri, and choreographer/landscape designer Meagan Yellott.
Aroussiak Gabrielian is an environmental designer and bioartist working with living organisms, natural systems, and atmospheric phenomena to explore multispecies entanglements across scales. Her work aims to torque our imaginaries to help us re-think our interactions with both human and non-human agents on this planet.
Resham Mantri is a queer, first-generation Indian-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, death worker, and single co-parent seeking liberation and pleasure through practicing vulnerability, exploring lineage, dismantling socialized notions of self, and death work. They explore these ideas across mediums, including installations, essays, photos, Instagram, interviews, vintage Indian textiles, and hosting death cafes.
Meagan Yellott is an interdisciplinary explorer at heart who sees choreography as a space to learn and build community through a practice that interrogates, challenges, and shifts our systems. For Meagan, dance and movement are for all bodies, terrestrial, heavenly, and otherwise, as we contain multitudes, and choreography is a way to organize and express our experiences, those that are both known and unknown to us. Perhaps it is a path to healing or simply a way to feel.