Griefscape

“Some things seem too big to be felt alone because they are”
– Prentis Hemphill

We’ve been turning out for a year now, voicing our rage to a growing crowd of familiar faces, trying to find ever new ways to manage the escalating horrors we continue to witness; skinned raw by the inequity of vulnerability made visible through proximity to direct violence, all while the punishing terror of confronting our own powerlessness to stop. help. save. change. seems to overwhelm us. We live between sprinting into action / outrunning out own disorientation; obsessively mobilising, organising, data-gathering, intellectualizing, disassociating, documenting, archiving, and donating to make it make sense: to make it

Stop.

For this moment: don’t organise. don’t run. don’t distract. don’t swipe.

Sit with it.

Here is your grief.

Sit with it.

What might have escaped your attention while urgency so completely ruled your nervous system?

What ruptures in the narrative might emerge when you listen to the lungs crack?

When the lump is not swallowed, but bursts?

What cracks form in the stronghold of Empire when you attend to the heart?

Entangling wordings and soundings together in embedded media, our piece for “Groundswell” rests on breath to explore affective experiences and struggles in this time of genocide and resistance, and the unyielding grief that closes all paths but through.