Grief is a response to severe loss and a very common yet highly individualized disruption to the meanings of life. An encounter with grief can lead us into the dark – a place of destabilization – where learning to stay with it demands a shift in thinking and acting towards life before and after.
Grief is directed towards the private, affective side of loss, while mourning inhabits the rather public and ritualized side of it. This tension between the private and the public can be conceptualized metaphorically, with grief residing in an apartment and mourning situated in its immediate surroundings.
This research project is embedded into my practice of graphic design. It is a study of how the two spheres of grief and mourning interact with each other. How does one move out of the apartment, considering modes of editing, correcting, or styling? Considering modes of context and situatedness, how does mourning leave its dirt in grief’s apartment even if it took off its shoes?
A critical examination of radical publishing and its tools of graphic design, writing, editing, and facilitating is used to understand the relational tension of the affective and the edited. How can this relation be shifted? Which economies of reason, affect, and emotion influence acts of making public?
This artistic research project investigates the expansion of the term "publishing" to unfold its significance as a common, everyday practice of rendering emotions, reflections, and narratives accessible to the public. In a transdisciplinary manner, it will engage with queer_feminist, power-critical discourses about ‘publicnesses’ and ‘aftercare’. These notions will be approached from different vantage points, not only as social constructs, but as practical circumstances. The practical lens in use is graphic design and is regarded as a collective, socially conscious, and context-driven practice.
The central research objective is to explore and offer gestures of making and holding space for grief and its moments of "unmeaning". In this context, "unmeaning" is a term appropriated from Jack Halberstam's body of work. It outlines the obscenity of questioning fundamental assumptions of the prevailing courses of things.
Franziska Bauer (1991, DE) is a designer, queer-feminist activist, lecturer, self-publisher and community organizer.
Her work focuses on intersections between theory, poetics, and typography, as well as the process and the performativity of writing with a strong love for multi-paged graphic design. These engagements are embedded into queer-feminism and surrounded by questions of disruption, straight-forwardness, and chaos.
Bauer graduated from University of the Arts Bremen with an MA degree in Integrated Design. Her final thesis (2019) was titled ‘Die gerade Linie, die existiert nur in der Vorstellung’ (‘The straight line exists only as a notion’). Bauer has worked as a lecturer in the fields of typography, gender, and media studies in Bremen, Berlin, and Potsdam. As a freelancer, she has worked with different artists, institutions, and publishers such as Theaterhaus Gessnerallee (Zürich), Kampnagel (Hamburg) or Spector Books (Leipzig). In collaboration with graphic designer Tania Prill, Bauer received The Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2018 award.
In partnership with the University of the Arts Bremen's Binational Artistic PhD Program