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 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 perform 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. Through this, the book 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 must to be solitary endeavors. The authors, thus, 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 is a graduate of MA Theatre Arts from the University of the Philippines Diliman. Her research focused on the collaborative possibilities of environment and performance through the Pasig River rehabilitation project. She is currently based in Toronto, Canada. Her current creative pursuits can be viewed on her Instagram account: @iamthegreatalecks.
Kristof van Baarle is dramaturg and chair of the Drama Program at KASK – School of Arts (Ghent, B). 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 academic and other journals and book chapters, such as Performance Research, Etcetera, and Documenta. Since 2021, he is Associate Editor for Performance Research.
Peter Burke is an artist and teacher situated in Naarm, Melbourne, 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 the mass media. He currently lectures at 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 University of Roehampton and collaborates with the Artistic Creation, Cultural Practices and Policies research group at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Porto. She is invited adjunct professor at the Theatre Department at ESMAE (Escola Superior de Música e Artes do Espetáculo, Porto).
Sozita Goudouna is visiting professor at Goldsmiths where she initiated and teaches the MA on Breath Studies, she is the editor of the Performance Research 2024 issue “On Breath.” She taught the MA at the Steinhardt Department of Art at New York University as the inaugural post-doc Andrew W. Mellon 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 at 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 published by Edinburgh University Press. In 2022 she was the winner of the British Council Culture and Creativity UK Study Award.
Nilüfer Ovalıoğlu Gros is a contemporary theater maker and performance studies researcher from Istanbul, based in Paris. She 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 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 holding several MA degrees, in political science from SciencesPo Paris, in choreography from Amsterdam University of the Arts, and in philosophy from New York University. Adham Hafez 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. Before, he was connected to the independent performance scene in Berlin, Germany, where he was working for the Performing Arts Programm. He holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Freie Universität Berlin and an M.A. in Applied Theatre Studies (JLU Giessen). His artistic and theoretical interests include amongst others non-professional aesthetics, notions of home and questions of transculturality especially in “Central and Eastern” Europe.
Eero Laine is Associate Professor and Chair of 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, CUNY, and an MA in Performance Studies from NYU. Her research approaches contemporary performance through new materialism, ecocritical theory, and posthumanism. Sarah is assistant editor of TDR.
Juliana Moraes is Assistant Professor of Dance at University of Campinas (UNICAMP). An artist based in São Paulo and Campinas, her research engages with choreography and corporeality in theory and practice. Juliana holds a Ph.D. in Arts from UNICAMP and an MA in Dance Studies from Trinity Laban Conservatoire for Music and Dance. She received prizes such as Sao Paulo State Art Critics Award, Vitae Foundation Scholarship, and 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, SUNY. He is interested in the outer limits of science-fiction and fact with 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 RMA in Media and Performance Studies from Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and has been actively engaged in practice-led research since 2017. As well, he is co-founder of the NEWS Programme (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 Creativity Charitable Trust. Currently he holds the position of research assistant at University of Auckland (UoA).
Aneta Stojnić, Ph.D is a licensed psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City and a co-director of CAP Child and Adolescent Program at 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 published two books and two co-edited volumes, 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 authored numerous artistic and curatorial projects in collaboration with renowned institutions and organisations all over Europe. 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. https://anetastojnic.com/about/.
