Mourning Songs / Canções de Luto

Abstract

This project takes life-processes of mourning as underpinnings for its practice-led expression: Our article is structured over two interleaving grounds. The first, a site of intimacy expressed through a spatial practice of performance-installation, draws out methods of ‘site-writing’ (Jane Rendell) in relation to personal mourning. The second reaches deeper into an urban-collective ground of historic materialism (Walter Benjamin), working with specific sites this practice has ‘occupied’ or ‘site-written’. The thesis questions how personal-minor histories of mourning offer a significant contribution to urban sites, the public and associated fields of urban history, historic architecture and planning. It seeks to mine urban discourses through a site-specific practice set between urban design and performance-installation. It invites urban-otherness that extends perceived borders of the urban, folding its geological edges into telluric thresholds. This article touches on an original PhD practice-led contribution, in setting its discussion across scenes of personal mourning and urban remembrance.