Urban Lament

Lamentation practices can empower the potentiality to defy patriarchal orders ruling everyday life. Always a collective process, lamentation inscribes loss and vulnerability by tending bridges towards the world of the dead and the more-than-human. Gestures such as singing or breathing, gathering, and performances that exceed rationality can inspire a renewed approach to life and death, rural and urban. After all, amidst ongoing processes of extinction, how to mourn a queer activist, a Roma father, a burnt forest, an exiled body, and a ship sunken in the Mediterranean? How to experience loss not as something individual, but within an expanded continuum of pain? How to explore emotions beyond the private sphere? Through case studies and narrations, in different times and geographies surrounding the Aegean Sea, this book amplifies the echoes of collective tears to invigorate contemporary mourning practices that claim public space by grief, rage, and affect.

96 pages, 102 x 162 mm
illustrations: color and b/w
printing: offset
language: English
available fall 2023

Dead Trees
by Lydia Xynogala

Were you a Witness? Tracing Queer forms
of Lamentation in Contemporary Athens
by Marios Chatziprokopiou

They Let me Taste their Pain
by David Bergé

The Gate of Tears
by Liwaa Yazji

Without Fear to Address the Dead
by Eliana Otta

Center Stage Mamas and their Crying Game
by Debra Levine
edited by
Sofia Grigoriadou
Eliana Otta
David Bergé

In this extraordinary book, we learn that in Greek, ​​μαρτυρασ (witness) is the same word for martyr. Maybe we are all witnesses and martyrs of the horrendous destruction and suffering we are causing in the world. These ancient/new words may help us revive the art of collective mourning, the sacred howl of our souls, as these authors propose. Let’s hear their song, the ‘dangerous voice’ of our laments: “salt in seawater approximates that of human tears.”
— Cecilia Vicuña, 2023