Rosa Simone (they/them), Utrecht, is currently reading Cruising Utopia by José Muñoz as part of the long-term trandsciplinary research project Mourning School, initiated in collaboration with curator Lucie Gottlieb, Stockholm.
Mourning School queers our relationships to death, dying, mourning and loss by asking who gets to live and die, who is remembered and who is deemed ungrievable? Loss is omnipresent - the loss of loved ones, land, language, species, health mental and physical - in times of social, political and ecological crises. Yet grief remains isolated, private, stimagized, standardized and more and more a diagnosis in need of a cure. With Mourning School we aim to open up a safer space to hold and sense conversations which reimagine our relationships to death and dying, grief and loss, and move towards affirmative, collective mourning.
During their stay at Malongen, Rosa will work on a web of references, thoughts, feelings, sounds, words, conversations, and archival material as nodes and connections to further conversations on what Mourning School will be.
Rosa Simone is a translator, pedagogue and curator. In their practice they explore collaborative and experimental translation, digital accessibility, disability justice, mental health, critical pedagogy and radical publishing. They worked as curator of language & dissemination at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons in Utrecht, and, together with art educator and curator Alen Ksoll, they initiated School in Common a self- organised school for learning, studying and being in common in 2017.
Mourning School is organised in collaboration with Galleri Nef (Stockholm), School in Common and members of The Queer Death Studies Network. The program starts in June 2021 with an exhibition at Galleri Nef. Mourning School received a projektbidrag bill och from from Kulturrådet and the Globus Opstart grant from the Nordic Culture Fund. Mourning School joins Dear, in residence on Vifärnaholme in August 2021.