Mourning Methods

Abstract

There is no encapsulated decisive moment in mourning. Rather, it manifests as time based and time oriented collaging amalgamated from broad notions of the archive. Particularly, the author’s practice of historical collaging interlaces the past and present with a hopeful thread of futures reliant upon her performing as an artist-magician aspiring to break the mourning. Optical undoing is the point of departure that the author’s art practice often takes while running back and forth with the dead and dying. For this issue, the author discusses what could be methods of visual critical fabulation (to borrow Saidiya Hartman’s term) via the metaphorical weaving, burning, excision, and preservation as mourning methods that span her predominantly lens-based work.