Homeless, passed or melted away: once the subject of our loss has vanished, its conditions remain, and we are left to assess the objects that determine how we may continue to relate to a world where grief goes unnoticed.

The ambivalence in this search for continuity marks the starting point in the works of artist R.I.P. Germain. Weaving together discontinued narrative threads of people lost to state-sponsored domination and gang violence, the Luton-born artist invites his audience to contemplate the signifiers that invoke one’s experience of death. Like the pressure of a line break in a poem, works like Sonny (2020) are self-operatic assemblages: cosmetic products, toys and school uniforms are carefully placed inside and on top of a vitrine, emotively tapping tenderness with precarity. Tyson X (2018) is one of four karaoke videos that displays a sequence of social-media content, providing a backdrop that mirrors the lyrical violence of UK drill tunes. Entertainment fraught with traces of loss acts as a coping mechanism for communities whose experience of death is incompatible with any blanket conceptions as how to grieve and whose lives are deemed grievable. Vibrating within the thrall in which the subjective experience of grief holds us, these works defy any desire to understand them as opaque representations of Black grief. Instead, they are sites that challenge preconceived notions of what grief ought to feel or look like.

Looking at the objects that make up the flat scenery of everyday life through the lens of affect – steering against predominant structural tendencies – the work of the late Lauren Berlant places the body in its vulnerable totality at the centre of our sense-making. “We used to live as well as we knew the landscape,” they wrote in their 2008 essay “Thinking about feeling historical”, a prelude to their seminal work Cruel Optimism (2011). A premonition of what is to come, or rather, of what’s at work beneath the landscape of the everyday, Berlant’s project understands the workings of our habitual processes (anxiety, anticipation, sensing) to be in an ongoing negotiation with a felt, imminent crisis (loss, personal failures, a virus, global warming, civil unrest). The “cruel” in cruel optimism describes the perpetuating anguish of wanting to belong to a system that has fundamentally already rejected you – influenced, if not determined, as Berlant argues, by an (American) ethic that rewards blind ambition with financial and emotional security and defines citizenship as a merit, rather than a right. The four works in Germain’s 2022 exhibition, aptly titled Four Bedrooms With an En Suite, a Garage & Garden in a Nice Neighbourhood at London’s VO Curations invert the promise of the so-called “good life.” An earth mound speckled with toys, “ALLAH Burned His Brain” (2022) obstructs the path to a deserted tent – a reference to US and UK homeless camps – where a hat, bandana, a bulletproof vest inscribed with invocations, and a mask show traces of identity through an absence of life. “ALLAH…” explains identity as something one is in fear of exposing as much as losing. By extending his invitation to cross the mound and overcome one’s trepidations, Germain suggests that representation and participation are dependent: if unwilling to communicate with and through our bodies, we cannot speak for those of others.

Above and left, R.I.P. Germain, “ALLAH Burned His Brain”, 2022

Indifferent to the arcs of its scenery, accustomed to its vista, she who looks indifferently at her landscape lives a narrative without having to question the reasons for its telling – familiarity is a situation uninterrupted by loss. But to think about grieving is a means to assess one’s felt relationship to a landscape that bears no trace of our losses. The task at hand, according to Berlant, is to come up with a new coalition of genres through which an unthinkable event or unwanted transformation can unfold. In returning to that which feels at once intimate and distant (“Now I can never go back to Korea”), the ancient technology of ritual provides an alternative to the binary relationship between space and constraint. Germain’s new film mew (2022), a continuation of his practice with burning rituals, is set in Trinidad and takes influence from Orisha tradition. Through an open call, the artist collected wishes for a new and better future. Rewritten onto bamboo shards by Germain, they burned together. How we negotiate the crisis of mortality mirrors the ways in which our affective management turns the ordinary gesture of thought (“I think you’re doing well”) into an extraordinary devotion. “[M]eeting the present is like meeting a new lover,” writes Berlant, “telling the story of how you get to be this way in the present moment suddenly changes its usual cadences because of the occasion of the telling.” Where loss and ongoingness may seem incompatible, rituals shed light on their contingency. In resisting the urge to search for its cure, we consider what the wound of loss can be generative of – here, grieving together has the power to imagine a different kind of scene.

Aked’s lyrical confessions navigate the recognisable soundscapes of pop: “We know too much about this … I think I don’t know anything.” Like Germain’s sites and rites that extend our understanding of Black grief for its relationality rather than its determinacy, such a pairing of familiar song with the alienating nature of loss resonates in the affective registers of grief. Instead of making up words when trying to sing along to an unfamiliar song, we redefine the misnomers that describe grief and loss in our cultural and political lexica. Through listening, sensing and giving new form to death, wanting to belong can overcome its solitary connotations. ◉