LOSS FOUND HOME

A week-long collaborative residency project bringing together artists, designers, and healers at The Swimming Hole Foundation in Bearsville, New York.

We explored the relationship between the mourning process and the design process. With the interest in interrogating the notion that death is the outcome of the process of life, we worked with death as an integral part of the life cycle. Our project was an experiment in taking the concept of a green funeral to a new degree and studying how we can design and build an ephemeral funeral home in which the making and execution processes positively impact climate health and human health.

Our process unfolded as we worked. We utilized collaborative creative practice to mourn those we have lost, and prepare for the loss of loved ones in hospice, by cultivating transformation within ourselves. We explored the notion that time is not linear and took practical action in the present to make peace with the past and the future. We made it a priority to nurture creative flow as this was the primary facilitator of transformation.

Prior to our time at The Swimming Hole we had two or three meetings to get to know one another a bit and gain clarity on each participant's interest in the project. Everyone came to the project with a variety of methods for studying and/or processing loss, death, and transformation, so we decided that we would like to begin our time together learning from each other. We all agreed that once we had a more in depth understanding of these processes we would be able to bring them together for mutual benefit. Before we arrived at The Swimming Hole, we each prepared an activity for the group to introduce the group to what we found most relevant from our practices.

After two days of sharing, we came together to return to our initial project idea “the concept of a green funeral” to ground us and guide us forward. Since commencement we had always been questioning who the project is for. Is it for the dead or the living? Is there a difference? As we continued to explore together, boundaries between dualities such as life/death, past/future, and to let go/to preserve began to dissolve. We witnessed how deep listening and respect for multiple perspectives has the capacity to unravel the rigid mind.

We decided we would take day three to individually explore the land, activate our creativity, and contemplate these questions. Individual exploration gave way to deep initial processing that felt necessary to continue. We acknowledged that these depths were possible because of the collective container and that we desired a project structure for the second half of our time together in which the collective would support the transformation of the individual, which would in turn support the transformation of the collective. 

We decided we would spend the next two days primarily working on our individual projects with a plan to each share our work within a group ceremonial procession at the end of our residency. Within this structure we each set the intention to bring the group into our work, allow ourselves to be seen in our grief, and supported in our transformation. At this point in the project there was a deep understanding that the truest form of giving and receiving are the same thing.

Just as we began our time together we concluded it. We each prepared an experience for the group to take part in. This time we brought the group to the area of the land in which we connected and guided them through the methods in which we processed, grieved, released, and began anew. We allowed the natural order of the spaces on the land in which we were drawn to dictate the order in which we shared. Together we moved through a procession of rooms within nature.

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