The title of this thesis is a list of its subtitles, 2022
Graduating thesis for Contextual Design Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven as a result of a year long research project about memory, grief and identity entangled with my own creative practice. Both the editorial design and the images are designed and created specifically for the text by my self, with a mix of personal and found images and objects that have undergone a process of ageing and change though printing and scanning repeatedly.
ABSTRACT
I shall begin by saying that this thesis has no title. Instead, its title is a list of its subtitles, its
content. One might say that this is an act of rebellion, or perhaps procrastination. One might
also say that this thesis is of an unclassifiable nature. Truth is, precisely its nature made it
unclassifiable, because by leaving it open, undefined, untitled, during its process allowed it to
grow and transform in ways it otherwise wouldn’t have.
The reason why I bring this up is because the importance of this body of work is certainly
its process, the way its contents came together—a process of continual becoming. This thesis is
an archive of notes, memories, and reflections that are meant to be read, and once more
reconstructed and shaped by whoever reads it. Like I said, this collection of written thoughts
come with no particular name, and in no particular order, they coexist in this body of work.
Ultimately, we are more than just our name. Are we not also a collection of our belongings, our
memories, our monuments, the things we leave behind?
That brings me to the focus of this thesis. Or at least what ignited this process: memory
and its material manifestations. I began this process by writing down the last memory I have of
my father, his last breathing moments. Borrowing Roland Barthes words in his thoughts on
photography, “I am interested in memory [photography] only for sentimental reasons; I want to
explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I
think”.1 So it is only natural that what started as an exploration of memory and its material
manifestations, or monuments, quickly and instinctively transformed into an exploration of grief, as I revisited and unearthed old losses.
On the one hand this thesis reflects on the memories and monuments—heirlooms and
keepsakes—that formed and shaped me in the space of the home. Memories I did not choose but
chose me, through things I did not shape but shaped me. On the other hand it grapples with the
monuments I shape. The monuments I make or leave behind, or decide not to, specifically
pertaining to my creative practice with clay. In both instances memory and materiality are
entangled with grief and loss. In moments of loss, memory, both tangible and intangible, internal
and external, comes in as an aid, a space of repose.
Voluminous grief is alive. Western society makes us believe grief constitutes a brief period of
time concentrated in the specific time of loss; it passes, it ends. Grief is not encapsulated in a
moment in time, nor is it placed in the past; grief is an ongoing, multilayered process that
transcends space and time—like memory. Moreover, grief is not one emotion, but an amalgam
of emotions, often tensely tangled, multilayered, sometimes heavy, sometimes light. Through
established models of grief and institutionalized forms of mourning society tells us to grieve a
certain way.2 In the West it often tells us to do so in private; and that the only spaces to put forth
your grief publicly are those established forms of mourning. That to be affected and vulnerable is
a weakness and pain should be kept hidden.3
Somewhere down this journey, deep into my wounds, I stumbled upon this quote while
reading Rebellious Mourning; Cindy Milstein says “Writing about grief is remembering it, and
dismembering it too, thereby discovering all sorts of aches and pains that one hadn’t seen at the
original time of loss and mourning.”4 Dismembering struck me most, as I found my self
physically dis-membering all sorts of aches this year. Dismembering my self, my past, my wounds.
Dismembering and remembering this body of text. And most importantly, dismembering
repetitions of my own pain with clay. Just like I resisted giving this body of text a title, I resisted
firing clay; because as I went deeper into the intimate and often unpredictable space of grieving,
paradoxically, I found stability in the instability of clay.
Due to the dominant narrative of ceramics, clay’s default state is thought to be its fixation
and permanence, but firing rids clay of its life, erasing its transformative properties, its memory.
Maintaining its raw state, and instead approached as an open-ended slow embodied process—
much like the writing of this thesis—clay remains relational, generative and reparative. Its
malleability enables one to shape emotions, and give them form and space to take up outside of
ourselves refusing social conventions that prescribe discrete grieving. In modern western societies
grief is often individualized, yet it should be a shared experience in the hopes of creating
eventually secure spaces to deal with loss, where the goal is not to “overcome” grief (as if it were
a thing to get rid of) but to embrace the change that comes with it.
With all these wounds left uncovered and raw, in clay I found an embrace, in clay I patched
myself together.
I re-membered myself.
In this process of continual becoming, the unreliability of memory is its strength, the same as it is
the instability of clay and the unpredictability of grief. Through this thesis I came to define
memory as a medium, just like clay, something I can shape and that in turn shapes me. Its
receptiveness, and its very condition of being alive transforms it into a tool to learn and unlearn;
it is this part of its character that becomes specially important during grief. The ephemeral
quality of the unfired body of work that arose from this process does not imply that it did not
exist, or its affective knowledge is not there. On the contrary, it monumentalize a moment in
time, an encounter, between grief, clay, and myself. Much like all the texts and reflections that
came out of this process, but for the sake of this thesis were deleted. They existed, they brought
comfort and release, they recorded this moment in time, they were as important in this grieving
practice as these words I write. These which did stay.
Bibliography
1. Roland Barthes and Richard Howard, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography.
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
2. Lyn H. Lofland, “The Social Shaping of Emotions: The Case of grief”, Symbolic
Interaction 8, no. 2 (1985):171-90.
3.Cindy Milstein, Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief, (California: AK
Press, 2017).
4. Cindy Milstein, Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief, (California: AK
Press, 2017).
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