Connecting to the Grief under the Rage

The focus of "Connecting to the Grief under the Rage" is on the relation between rage and grief. At the core of this workshop is the belief that the expression of our outrage over our loss fueled by injustice, is a vital tool for collective liberation. When the fire of our rage ignites from our experiences of injustice, the grief underneath that rage speaks to us about something we loved. How can we tap into the grief underneath the rage? How is the expression of our grief a way of honoring our (ability to) love? Through somatic exercises, working both with sound and movement, our focus will be to both personally and collectively give expression to the feeling of loss. Witnessing one another in these states will be key for kneading the feeling of collectivity and sustaining the energy together. 

Save the date: The next two workshops will take place on May 11 and May 25. 

The workshop will be held in Studio on the first floor of the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam building and can be reached by elevator and stairs. The venue is equipped with gender neutral toilets. The conversations will be held in English. A note from Raoni about the accessibility of the workshop: 

“This workshop is accessible to wheelchair users and people with limited movement range. It is not a requirement to have had any prior movement or voice training for this workshop. Most important is your commitment to the play and allowing yourself to touch uncomfortable places within the self and the social space.” 

Embodied solidarity as resistance. This is at the center of our new workshop series titled “There is Nothing to Fix. You Just Have to Let it Rock." We organize this community collaboration with friend and artist Raoni Muzho Saleh. Raoni chose this quote by artist and writer, Martin Prechtel as the title of the series to signal what is at the core of it; “feeling your emotions by being rocked by them instead of dispossessing yourself from your human experience by way of fixing your emotional turmoil”. This series centered on movement, play, mourning, wailing, singing and dancing and more invite participants to do just that. It will feature workshops by Raoni as well as artists he invited; A.E.Z. Pinay, Anllel Tanus and Laima Jaunzema. More information on their contributions will follow. 

 This program is inspired by the conversations we had with our collaborators in 2024 - Rethinking Wellness and Communal Embodied Practices specifically– in which we looked at ways to decenter thinking and working with the body from the notion of individualistic self-actualization. Instead we put the focus on imagining communal embodied practices as a necessity for our individual and collective awareness of the political and social climate around us, making it possible to build community and affect change collectively. This year we build on these moments of collective reimagining with the interactive workshop program “There is Nothing to Fix. You Just Have to Let it Rock." It is one of the community collaboration projects we do at Research Center for Material Culture that are an evolving practice of creating space for the creative agency for members of historically marginalized communities in the museum.