panel 6Arts of Death, Grief, and Transformation
Explore Life and Death with Munch
Christiaan Rhodius
Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was confronted with death during his youth. Both his mother and sister died when he was young. He was sick himself as well and as a result was bedridden a considerate amount of time. Death is one of the main topics in his work. This focus on death was criticized and called “sick.” Munch disagreed. In response to his critics, he writes that he paints so people can learn “from it and live after” (MM N 46, Munchmuseet. Datert 1930–1934. Notat.) So in a way, Munch saw his art as therapeutic and “care.”
Paradoxically, by deliberately facing death together, some of the threat death confronts us with is diminished. This relational dynamic is also described as “the palliative paradox.” These perspectives form the basis in the educational program in the MUNCH museum (Oslo) called “Explore Life and Death with Munch.” Initially used in the training of medical students, it has now also been used for nurses and priests in training. During the program the conversational model “coming to the essence” is introduced. This model points towards factual, emotional, and existential aspects in life. By engaging with the art of Munch, participants practice with the model. Groupwise, participants go through the exhibition and apply the model to a painting the group selects themselves. All group members engage with the painting personally and share their experiences together. In a plenary meeting all groups share about their experience while interacting with a work of Munch. Participants are encouraged to not only reflect on what actually happened (the factual level in the model), but also put words to how this affects their own feelings, existential point of view, and, ultimately, their future clinical practice. During this presentation, participants will be introduced to the model and put it to practice themselves.
Christiaan Rhodius is an elderly care physician who has worked as a consultant in palliative medicine in Hospice Bardo in the Amsterdam region. He currently lives in Oslo with his wife and four children and serves as a consultant in palliative medicine at the Lovisenberg Diakonale Hospital. Besides his clinical focus, he has been involved in an array of educational settings. He strives to engage with society at large around the topics of life, death, and palliative care. He is author of the book Omdat we leven – met met zicht op het einde(Because we live – with the end in sight). The relational aspect of care and how attachment theory can inspire us motivated him to write “How Attachment Transformed My Palliative Practice: Discovering the Palliative Paradox.”
Aquatic Alchemy: Navigating Grief Through Slow Swimming as a Transformative, Aesthetic Practice of Care and Healing
Deirdre M. Donoghue
For this conference, I would like to present my ongoing artistic research project exploring specifically framed aesthetic experiences as transformative practices of care and healing. My inquiry departs from a personal question of “How to live with grief?” and employs slow swimming as an artistic methodology together with creative writing, a performance practice, and the production of audiovisual work. This project began from a personal need to manage the everyday affective labor required by grief through the enactment of small-scale daily acts of establishing connection with my local ecologies. I first began exploring with what I here refer to as “slow swimming” in March 2022, after a diagnosis of a rare autoimmune disease attacking my organs through scarring and hardening, causing loss of function and ultimately failure. Over the course of a year my daily, eco-somatic, sensory, aesthetic encounters with different bodies of water, their visible and invisible inhabitants, and my own body as a living organism growing fibrosis began transforming my perception, experience, and understanding of myself as a broken body. I began experimenting with “slow swimming” as a transformative aesthetic practice through framing my swims as collaborative performances with the more-than-human bodies around me. For my presentation, I will present some of the recorded performances, while thinking further with them in relation to ecological relationality, reparative (aesthetics of) care, and healing.
Dr. Deirdre M. Donoghue is a visual and performance artist, practicing birth-doula, and an academic affiliated with Utrecht University where she is a lecturer at the Graduate Gender Program and KU Leuven, where she is a Researcher Associate. In her artistic work she most often sets up social scenarios and specifically framed human encounters where multiple relations can be set into motion, through which the production of new knowledge systems via cross-disciplinary approach becomes mobilised. Her doctoral dissertation ‘The Aesth-Ethics of Interruption’ examined maternal subjectivity and practices of care as aesthetic, political, and environmental forces in the creative processes of contemporary mother-artists (Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Utrecht University, 2021).
Research interests: care aesthetics, ecology, and the environment; medical humanities and care ethics; arts-based methodologies in care ethics.
A Masculine Art of Care? Exploring Men’s Creative, Playful, and Embodied Responses to Grief and Loss
Martin Robb
Research has shown that men are less likely than women to access conventional talking therapies in the aftermath of bereavement and other traumatic experiences. However, recent years have seen the development of a variety of creative initiatives that successfully engage men who have experienced grief, anxiety, or depression, through forms of shared, creative, and embodied activity. These have included bereaved fathers forming sports teams, “walking and talking” mental health groups, and projects that involve the collective creation of artworks, all of which can be described in the broadest sense as “playful,” and which have enabled men to achieve healing and repair. These developments prompt important questions for care theory. How exactly do embodied movement and shared, creative activity facilitate men’s psychological healing? What part is played in men’s emotional repair by caring with and for others? Is there something specifically “masculine” about men’s preference for active and embodied forms of care and self-care, and if so, what are the implications for thinking about caring masculinities? This presentation will explore these questions, drawing on the findings from a recent qualitative interview study with bereaved fathers in the UK. The paper will also discuss recent “grief memoirs” by creative artists, as well as a BBC documentary which followed a popular singer as he explored his and other men’s mental health experiences, for which the author was the academic adviser. The presentation will build on Maurice Hamington’s influential work on embodied care, as well as Christine Leroy’s recent research on “kinaesthetic empathy,” both of which draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body. Reference will also be made to the work of Petr Urban and Alice Koubová on the connections between art, play and care.
Martin Robb is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Health, Wellbeing and Social Care at The Open University (UK), where he leads the Master’s programme in Childhood and Youth Studies. Originally trained in the arts and humanities, he also holds qualifications in psychology and child development. Before entering academia, Martin spent a number of years organising education projects with socially marginalised groups and communities. His academic research has focused principally on issues related to men, masculinities, and care and has included studies of male childcare workers, involved fatherhood, bereaved fathers, and young masculinities. Martin is the author of Men, Masculinities and the Care of Children: Images, Ideas and Identities (Routledge, 2020) and co-editor with Kerry Jones of the forthcoming Men and Loss: New Perspectives on Bereavement, Grief and Masculinity (Routledge, 2025). Martin was the academic adviser to the BBC programme James Arthur: Out of Our Minds, exploring men’s mental health, for which he co-developed the animation Man Up or Open Up. He is co-editor of the international interdisciplinary journal Children & Society and host of the Careful Thinking podcast series, in which he explores ideas about care in conversation with writers, researchers, and practitioners at the cutting edge of current thinking about care.
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
Contact info Louis van den Hengel
Images homepage: Merel Visse, Christine Leroy
design website: Johanne de Heus and Marielle Schuurman