In her description of her doctoral practice “Lost & Shared: Approaches to collective mourning, towards affective and transformative politics” (defence date, Jan 11, 2023), Eliana Ottas writes:
“Taking as a departure point my experience working with war survivors in Peru, this project investigates how art can enable the collectivization of mourning. I connected my interest in the act of mourning human losses with my experiences living in Athens, Greece, where I encountered depression as a common diagnosis on both the individual and collective levels. If being depressed relates to unresolved mourning processes, what are the objects of loss caused by economic crisis and political disillusion? How can art help us to mourn an abstract loss, such as a political project, a certain sense of dignity, a particular relation with time and nature, or a fixed role in the familial structure? How could mourning be shared to allow communities to reframe and re-signify those objects of loss, towards transforming our relation to the economic and political?”
Enjoy the defense, dear Eliana. Thank you for this work.
Published by nee
I sought meaning in academic research about conflict transformation in relation to art and media history, and efforts for recovering the commons (PhD Cultural Studies with the London Consortium). I worked and taught with a number of universities, art-centers and internationally funded programs with increasing focus on free and open source technology, until a child reactivated my connection with a circle of heart-giving art educators in Brasil and helped me see what the Situationists' meant with their rejection of alienated labour. My child and I started mapping out and learning from the bravest and most meaningful art-educational initiatives around the world, and we've been focusing on holding space and community for free play, towards what Silvia Federici describes as a re-enchantment. Through my own learning path (including on-going training in Waldorf and Forest school teacher training, What Future for Education, London Institute of Education 2019; Hand in Hand Professional’s Intensive 2020) I have come to see learning as a state of being that is meaningfully embedded and present in its social setting, prioritising applied responses to local and community needs, and contributing to each other’s creative, practical, scientific, emotional and other developmental processes through a recognition of the abundant nature of the necessary resources, materials, information, peer-to-peer learning, and tools. | neeii.info
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