Siegmar Zacharias
Metabolising Collective Grieves
Workshop, English/Deutsch, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Mondays, 9-13 h, 7 Sessions: 28.4., 5.5., 12.5., 19.5., 26.5., 2.6., 16.6.2025, Hardenbergstr. 33, rooms 101 & 102

Registration on Moodle starts on 14.4.2025: https://moodle.udk-berlin.de/moodle/course/view.php?id=2671
Enrollment Key: grief

This is an invitation to explore what it is to expand our collective capacity to hold space for difficult and painful things without feeling overwhelmed, immobilized or demanding quick fixes and rescue from discomfort. Grieving is one of those practices. And in this course you can explore how your cultural/artistic practice can hold space for the transformative processes of grieves. Grieves is a term I coined to suggest that there is no universalist concept as grief, but that there are as many grieves as there are bodies and situations. We acknowledge that there are different grieves present: personal losses, climate grief, grief because of social injustices, ecocides, genocides. Personal, collective and planetary “Grieves” have more to do with the ways in which we “do” grieving and how we are “undone” and “done” by grieving than with a state of a pre-existing subject.
In this course we will delve into how facing the difficult, painful and disruptive can mobilize for resisting, standing up, fighting or simply changing course for livable futures.
We will work on the base of somacoustic listening sessions, and read Vanessa Andriotti: Hospicing Modernity. We will meet the work of collectives like Gesturing towards decolonial Futures. Participants will be invited to develop a practice that can hold space for such transformative metabolisms.

Fulfilment criteria for ungraded accreditation:

• reading of assigned literature:  Andreotti, V. de O., 2021. Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism. North Atlantic Books.
• (group-) presentation of a chapter of Andreaotti 2021
• development of a daily practice
• sharing/presentation of the daily practice in final session
• attendance

Siegmar Zacharias was born in Romania and lives in Berlin. She is a performance artist and researcher, a trained death doula and she studies traditional plant medicine. At the intersection of art, radical pedagogy and activism, she works collaboratively learning from grieving. The work generates performances, immersive installations, encounters and durational projects that address generative ethical dynamics of transformation. Since 2016 she has been curating "Training for political imaginaries", 24hrs symposia where ecologies of artistic and social practice are shared. Together with Steve Heather, she developed the somacoustic listening sessions WAVES – listening towards social bodies as containers for collective grieving, in which the materiality of sound is explored on an intimate metabolic level. Together with Shelley Etkin, Kitti Zsiga, and women in a post-migrant neighbourhood in Neuköln with ancestors from Turkey, Kurdistan, Syria, Iran, Jordan and Palestine they have developed the SocialBodyApothecary valuing the knowledges and resources stored in our bodies and lands, practicing making medicine together as a decolonial practice of resistance against structural violence.