Mourning the Ends: Collaborative Writing and Performance is an opening, a beginning, an attempt to rethink how we can be, think, and work together. This book, authored by a multitude, explores new methodologies of collaborative scholarship for the arts and humanities within the context of the various ecological, medical, military, and epistemic ends facing the world.
The authors of Mourning the Ends performed an experimental methodology as the book was researched, written, and revised by fifteen individuals situated across the globe. The writing emerged in part from a shared sense of mourning through the global pandemic and ongoing ecological catastrophes, yet the questions and arguments that are raised are immediately relevant as the rolling crises of our contemporary moment play out and further develop. The volume challenges a number of key areas in performance studies as well as foundational expectations and assumptions of the arts and humanities more broadly—namely, that writing and scholarship should be solitary endeavors. The authors write back against the model of thinking and studying that centers the singular genius, especially against the backdrop of enduring and apparent end times.
Mourning the Ends is in some ways a rehearsal for another future, a speculative engagement with performance, ecology, and academic affiliation beyond institutional bounds—a methodology for shared mourning, performance, and thinking.
About the Authors
Maria Shantelle Alexies Ambayec is a Filipino environmentalist, actress, and producer. She has an MA in Theatre Arts from the University of the Philippines, Diliman. Her research focuses on the collaborative possibilities of environment and performance through the Pasig River rehabilitation project. She is currently based in Toronto, Canada and her current creative pursuits can be viewed on her Instagram account: @iamthegreatalecks.
Kristof van Baarle is dramaturg and chair of the Drama Program at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium. As a dramaturg, Kristof is a longtime collaborator of Kris Verdonck/A Two Dogs Company, Michiel Vandevelde, and Thomas Ryckewaert. He has published about his research and dramaturgical works in various book chapters and in academic and other journals, such as Performance Research, Etcetera, and Documenta. Since 2021, he has been Associate Editor for Performance Research.
Peter Burke is an artist and teacher situated in Naarm, Melbourne in Australia. His work uses socially engaged strategies combined with current concerns and conventions of art, especially those involving social interaction in public spaces. By these means, he examines topical issues and questions the general condition of contemporary society. His projects intersect with painting, drawing, performance, video, and mass media. He currently lectures in the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne.
Renata Gaspar is an artist and independent performance studies researcher. Her work focuses on the socio-political construction of place in/through art-making, particularly on mobility in relation to language and belonging. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of Roehampton and collaborates with the Artistic Creation, Cultural Practices and Policies research group at the Institute of Sociology, University of Porto. She is an invited adjunct professor in the Theatre Department at the Escola Superior de Música e Artes do Espetáculo, in Porto, Portugal.
Sozita Goudouna is a visiting professor at Goldsmiths, University of London where she initiated and teaches in the MA program in Breath Studies. She is also the editor of the 2024 issue of Performance Research, “On Breath.” She taught in the MA program in the Steinhardt Department of Art at New York University as the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Post-doctoral Curator Fellow at Performa NYC and has held adjunct positions at City University New York (CUNY), teaching Renaissance, modern, and contemporary art history. She also taught in the Architecture Department of Roger Williams University and the Cultural Management Department at the University of the Peloponnese. She is the author of Beckett’s Breath: Anti-theatricality and the Visual Arts (Edinburgh, 2018), and in 2022 she was the winner of the British Council’s Culture and Creativity UK Study Award.
Nilüfer Ovalıoğlu Gros is a contemporary theater maker and performance studies researcher from Istanbul, based in Paris. She has pursued her artistic and academic career in the United States (MFA), England (PhD), Turkey, and France. Her work focuses on gendered rebellion and revisits history through embodied research methods. She creates through sounds, myths, and testimonies that challenge official state-nation narratives, particularly those of northern Mesopotamia. She has published articles in the Journal of Embodied Research and Performance Research Journal. She is currently a doctoral researcher at the National Academy of Dramatic Arts (CNSAD-PSL) in Paris where she pursues practice-based research on the viscerality of gendered resistance.
Adham Hafez is an award-winning artist working with choreography and sound, a theorist focusing on cognitive injustice, and a curator working with underrepresented historical narratives and minoritarian discourses. He is a PhD candidate at New York University with several MA degrees in political science from SciencesPo Paris, in choreography from Amsterdam University of the Arts, and in philosophy from New York University. Adam is the founder of HaRaKa, an Arab-International platform dedicated to movement and performance research and production. Currently he is the creative director of Wizara, the first blockchain-based company built by artists for artists.
Jan-Tage Kühling is a theater and performance scholar, theater maker, and cultural worker. Currently, he is the director of the Goethe-Centre in Yerevan, Armenia. Prior to this, he was connected to the independent performance scene in Berlin, Germany, where he was working for the Performing Arts Program. He holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Freie Universität Berlin and an MA in Applied Theatre Studies from JLU Giessen. His artistic and theoretical interests include non-professional aesthetics, notions of home, and questions of transculturality, especially in “Central and Eastern” Europe.
Eero Laine is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. He is co-editor of Lateral, the journal of the Cultural Studies Association, and participates in the Ends Network, developing collaborative methodologies for performance scholarship.
Sarah Lucie is Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the Arts and Humanities Department. She holds a PhD in Theater and Performance from The Graduate Center, City University of New York and an MA in Performance Studies from New York University. Her research approaches contemporary performance through new materialism, ecocritical theory, and posthumanism, and she is assistant editor of The Drama Review.
Juliana Moraes is Assistant Professor of Dance at University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. An artist based in São Paulo and Campinas, her research engages with choreography and corporeality in theory and practice. Juliana holds a PhD in Arts from UNICAMP and an MA in Dance Studies from Trinity Laban Conservatoire for Music and Dance. She has received honors such as the Sao Paulo State Art Critics Award, Vitae Foundation Scholarship, and the UNESCO Aschberg Bursary for Artists. She is the director of the Laboratory for Experimental Practices in Choreography at UNICAMP’s Corporeal Arts Department.
Evan Moritz is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Center for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies who received his MA in Theater and Performance at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. He is interested in the outer limits of science-fiction and fact with current research focused on performances about Martian settlement and knowledge-making in the Canadian Arctic.
Malin Palani is a theater and performing artist and thinker working from Waterloo, Iowa in the United States.
Rumen Rachev holds an MA in Media and Performance Studies from Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and has been actively engaged in practice-led research since 2017. He is also the co-founder of NEWS (Negative Emissions and Waste Studies Programme) and is Creative Guest, Wairua Awhina (Helping Spirit), and Director of 希望学 (Hope-ology) at Activities and Research in Environments for the Creativity Charitable Trust. Currently he holds the position of research assistant at the University of Auckland.
Aneta Stojnić, PhD, is a licensed psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City and a co-director of CAP Child and Adolescent Program at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Alongside psychoanalysis, Aneta’s areas of research include artistic and theoretical practices at the intersections of art, culture, and politics. She has published two books and two co-edited volumes, including Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance: Danger, Im/mobility and Politics (Palgrave, 2018) as well as dozens of peer-reviewed articles on contemporary art, media, and culture. She is one of the editors of the magazine ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action and co-host of the Room podcast. Aneta has also authored numerous artistic and curatorial projects in collaboration with renowned institutions and organisations all over Europe and she has taught performance, art, and media theory at universities and art academies in Vienna, Belgrade, and Ghent. She regularly presents her work and research at conferences and festivals worldwide.
