Listening to the Vultures

Abstract

Through this text, I will share the path I threaded starting from an individual one-to-one practice of mediation between a person deceased and a person alive, the Landscapes of the Dead, and arriving to a collective performative practice of noisy listening titled To know the vultures so well. This path has led me through intimate in-depth research on the different sensorial and imaginal relations we can establish with the dead. How did I relate to them as invisible entities that accompany the living? How was their apparent absence made present through different bodily practices? The research was developed in response to the apparently “disenchanted” western context where I have been residing for almost 20 years, in which death is something that needs to be dealt with as quickly and as silently as possible. Certain places in the world get to forget about the killings that sustain their lives, because they have been made to forget that they too will die. Within my practice, loss is acting as an amplifier of connections with the world. Seeing death as part of life does not stop the grieving and the mourning, it does not dissolve the fear of death, but it does mean that we can inhabit the affective places made of the discomfort of loss and the discomfort of not knowing.