Dispatch: Care Work is Grief Work

There is no speaking about grief without speaking about volume. In the opening scene of The Human Mourning, José Revueltas describes death as sitting on a chair, waiting to enter the body of an ill young girl.11.'For death is not dying, but what precedes dying, what immediately precedes it, when it has not yet entered the body but is there, still and white, black, violet, bruised, seated on the nearest chair'. My translation. José Revueltas, El luto humano, Mexico: Editorial México, 1943, p.10. As she sits, her volume morphs, changing colors. Here, death is not dying but the materialization of the father’s grief – occupying space, resting on a surface – in the moment he fully realizes his daughter is going to die.

Revueltas' description buzzes in my head, not only because it captures the moment grief becomes physically tangible but also because it pins down the exact instant the possibility of loss emerges – grief does not appear when we lose something, but rather when we recognize loss as inevitable. I have returned to this passage lately, particularly after attending the last session of the ‘Climate Forum III: Towards Change Practices: Poetics and Operations’. Curator Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide and multi-hyphenate artist G presented recent research developments from Regenerative Time – one of four research threads in the upcoming collection presentation at the Van Abbemuseum, that, among other themes, explores how death can figure in a heritage institution.

And how can death figure in an institution that promises immortality after works are acquired for the collection? If objects enter a museum collection to live forever, must they not die first? Are archives not our graveyards? Like Revueltas’ text, G’s practice is generative in relation to these questions. Her work explores the volume of grief and its many expressions – the shape of absence, the gesture of contouring what is lost. Yolande’s practice, in turn, often deploys speculative narratives as a tool for recasting artworks away from traditional readings – away from claims of universal value, asserting that history is always negotiated. Yolande has invited G to develop, alongside the museum’s conservation team, an addendum to the existing conservation protocol, based on a series of case studies that explore the many ways (beyond material decay) in which an artwork can ‘die’. Additionally, G is to score a series of ceremonies to both celebrate and mourn art works, and to mediate this transition – attention to ritual insists that grief cannot be expedited.

Within the framework of a heritage institution, the task the project brings forth has both research and speculative latitude. A regenerative approach to time invites an expanded understanding of objecthood, recognizing that artworks can die means acknowledging that they also live – that they have lovers, detractors, and relationships unfolding over time, punctuated by ceremonial appreciation. And it involves a structural questioning of the museum’s collecting practices, which lean toward accumulative preservation as a means of denying mortality. Is this refusal to let go itself a form of grief? Is there potential for renewal in the process of release?

Attendees at the online presentation at the Climate Forum III were asked to bring an object they felt represented them and were willing to let go of. In a previous in-person edition of the presentation these items were laid on a table. When reminded that they might actually have to part with them, attendees quickly reclaimed what they couldn’t afford to lose. When projected onto the logic of conservation work, this anecdote prompts a reflection on what loss can trigger. Even as they care for objects, conservators are perpetually grieving them. Grief must sit in the conservator’s chair because, in order to prevent possible loss, their task is to assume that loss is always possible, to search for evidence that death is a diligent creature.

Conservation, then, is inherently speculative labour, operating in the realm of preventative measures for a future change of state. Or as Jane Henderson observes, much of conservation work is guided by the question: ‘Is my object being damaged in a way I currently cannot see, but someone might detect in the future with equipment I don’t yet possess?’22.Jane Henderson, ‘Beyond Lifetimes: Who Do We Exclude When We Keep Things for the Future?’, Journal of the Institute of Conservation 43, no. 3, 2020, p.198. If successful conservation delivers benefits for the future, how are these objects alive in the present? May we, propelled by anticipatory mourning, deprive our artworks from living a rich public life?

And yet, speculative vigilance collides with the growing burden of accumulation in a shrinking museum storage space. G plays a run and gun video, musicalized to drum and bass and shot at the museum’s storage, where stacked crates tower over the cameraperson in a mazy configuration. From this paradoxical articulation follows the project’s critique of the value system sustaining the presumed common horizon of cultural heritage. What feels easier to let go of? What do we rush to retrieve from the table? Who stands behind “we”? To uncommon histories we must uncommon futures, says Yolande – who are we keeping all this for? Regenerative time calls for a conservation practice that holds as much as it releases, cradles transition, belly laughs while mourning and allows itself some time. If only a minute. If only an hour. If only a day. For all ages. 33.Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide (ed.), G’s Grief-Sad-Feeling-Weird-Out-of-This-World Coloring Book, Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2022.