THE BOOK OF QUESTIONS (2024)
The closer one gets to the essence of their testimony, to the heart of the most violent and profound incidents, the more elusive the memory becomes. To work within this limitation, we listen not to what’s there, but to the gaps. We create a dialogue with absence.
The Book of Questions adheres to a therapeutic practice that offers rituals for grief by activating new modes of remembering through collaboratively re-creating portraits, images, and memories of the dead. The aim here is two-fold: an active working through of traumatic memory, and a creation of a new, living archive that confronts public vs. private registers of memory.
This work began with the memories, dreams, and archive of my family after the death of my older brother. To find new ways to work with and access traumatic memory, we engage the senses: we focus on smell, sounds, and textures. Using rituals ranging from memorializing clothing, letter writing, collage, and re-creating dreams, the Book of Questions is a collaboration with individuals who have lost partners, children and parents to overdoses.
This work is interested in questions of trauma, testimony and death. It is interested in questioning what counts as evidence, the idea of the witness, the politics of memory, and the seeming absence of a violent perpetrator.
The closer one gets to the essence of their testimony, to the heart of the most violent and profound incidents, the more elusive the memory becomes. To work within this limitation, we listen not to what’s there, but to the gaps. We create a dialogue with absence.
The Book of Questions adheres to a therapeutic practice that offers rituals for grief by activating new modes of remembering through collaboratively re-creating portraits, images, and memories of the dead. The aim here is two-fold: an active working through of traumatic memory, and a creation of a new, living archive that confronts public vs. private registers of memory.
This work began with the memories, dreams, and archive of my family after the death of my older brother. To find new ways to work with and access traumatic memory, we engage the senses: we focus on smell, sounds, and textures. Using rituals ranging from memorializing clothing, letter writing, collage, and re-creating dreams, the Book of Questions is a collaboration with individuals who have lost partners, children and parents to overdoses.
This work is interested in questions of trauma, testimony and death. It is interested in questioning what counts as evidence, the idea of the witness, the politics of memory, and the seeming absence of a violent perpetrator.
