A mater of loss

Authors

  • Phoebus Osborne

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Abstract

How can one imagine speaking to grief using language? How do we hold such a thing within language, imperial language no less? When we centre grief, do we make it generic? When you say grief and I say grief, is it even possible to mean the same thing? What is missing when we say grief, when we gather to contemplate grief, when we claim to research grief? This article explores these and other questions in a multidisciplinary format combining film, images and autobiographical writing.

Author Biography

Phoebus Osborne

Phoebus Osborne (b. 1984) is an interdisciplinary artist, based in New York, NY and Amsterdam, NL. His practice engages material traces of ancestral, current, and future relationships through a matrix of film, sculpture, performance, drawing, writing, and sound. Extending from his lived-experience with chronic pain, he contemplates the accelerating illnesses of the planet at large and considers how modes of relating can empower resilience and enable repair. Osborne’s works are invitations to slow down and move in relation to our changing ecologies in a practice of curiosity, attention, and care, crafting opportunities for relational imaginative dreaming-otherwise.

His works have been presented within the US and Europe, including commissioned works at Transmediale Berlin, La Caldera Barcelona, SFMoMA, Oakland Museum of California, and Lenfest Center for the Arts, The Poetry Project, e-flux Bar Laika, Southern Exposure, The Boiler of Pierogi Gallery. Osborne was a 2017 Impulstanz DanceWEB recipient, a 2018-2021 Hercules Art Studio resident, and a 2021-22 A.I.R. Gallery Fellow. Since 2023, his performance work has been presented online by Lucid. He holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and an MA in Choreography from DAS Graduate School in Amsterdam. He is an adjunct faculty at Parsons, The New School, and Columbia University, and has been a guest artist at NYU’s Playwright School, in Amsterdam at DAS Graduate School and the Academy of Theater and Dance. He was a 2024 Artistic Research Fellow at The Academy of Theater & Dance in Amsterdam.

References

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Published

26-02-2025

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 2 (2024): With the Dead: Performance Philosophy, Dying, and Grief

Section

Articles

Categories

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Copyright (c) 2024 Phoebus Osborne

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