Feeling through Clay: Processing Collective Grief and Mourning

The Armory invites you to join artist Aroussiak Gabrielian, grief worker Resham Mantri, and choreographer Meagan Yellott in a clay workshop exploring collective grief and healing. Drawing on clay's therapeutic qualities, the workshop invites you to shape, mold, and transform clay to process the weight of the current moment, bearing witness to collective atrocities across the globe—from genocide to ecocide.

Participants will have the opportunity to contribute their clay creations to the artist’s installation. RSVPs are not required but are appreciated.

How can we physically feel our way through grief and mourning? What does it mean to be connected through shared matter in our grief and mourning?

Drawing on the inherently therapeutic qualities of clay as a medium, the workshop will explore, process, and express collective grief, mourning, atonement, and healing through embodied and tactile engagement with shared matter.

Through direct, hands-on, and non-verbal expression rooted in the senses, particularly touch, we will shape, mold, and transform clay as we process the weight of the current moment, bearing witness to collective atrocities across the globe - from genocide to ecocide.

We are interested in exploring the following questions and more:

How can we physically feel our way through grief and mourning? What does it mean to be connected through shared matter in our grief and mourning? What form can collective care take in the face of collective death? How do we love and accept the grieving body with all its adjustments, changes, and inflammations? How do we grieve and honor dying bodies during a genocide? What part of our inflammations are connected to collective death? How can working with shared matter like clay bring us back to working with the shared matter of our bodies? How does working with external matter extend to caring for external bodies beyond our own?