Dear Society, is a grieving circle initiated by Dutch curator Julia Fidder as an invitation to gather around experiences of loss, mourning, and love. Since 2024, Dear Society, has hosted public events in cinemas, galleries, and theatres, exploring the possibilities of rekindling rituals and collective mourning through contemporary art. Dear Society, has held space to formulate shared practices, affects and vocabularies for experiences of personal and societal loss, and resisting over-productivity, hyper-consumption, and isolation. Club Grief is a club night for grievers and friends, hosted for the first time in Helsinki on 22 February 2025 at Madhouse, an artist-run performance and production space for live art. The lineup featured performances by Death by Landscape (Victor Gogly and Joni Judén) and M LORE, and a participatory installation by Leik Silvestrini. This is a reflection on the pervasive passion – the other side of grief – that soaked Club Grief’s dancefloor, and the melancholic anger that, once made collective, can mobilise mutual recognition, acceptance, and possibly regeneration.

The gig begins slowly, mellow in the reassuring energy that ambient music diffuses amongst a crowd of acquaintances. Bathed in blue and orange, Victor Gogly and Joni Judén ever so slightly undulate to the music commencing. Death by Landscape guide us gently into their sonic landscape with a mix of synthetic sounds and field recordings; almost descriptive to begin with, while at times surprising. Woody, leafy, watery noises chime to the subtle humming of Gogly’s guitar.

Two neatly chopped wood logs lay funnily next to Judén’s mixing table. He crouches and disappears behind the cloth, touching the bark with a contact mic. The music becomes dense and dark, as natural sounds glitch over a sort of buzz. The composition arches into a cinematic soundtrack: a eulogy to decomposing, a love letter to the richness of a land about to die. Gogly’s bass is now almost narrative. I picture a large misty valley and a poet hollering to its inevitable withering. ‘Through an attention to loss, we are looking for ways of thwarting the mechanisms of domination; this is about connecting worlds and exploring new ways of composing,’ Victor explains.

Increasingly, the sounds morph into an abstract and dramatic choir, which is now growing angry, powerful, sad. The mourning is violent and no longer ours; the land shouts through its own necrosis. To end, Death by Landscape allow us a cleansing shower: water drops surround our earing, calming the mind, before the soundscape fades. Victor and Joni lull gently to the music. The kindness of their presence catches my attention, appreciating Death by Landscape as another loving statement to the real and everyday companionship with the land and its regeneration, which Victor and Joni have dedicated the last years of their practice to.

Sara Blosseville and Victor Gogly moved to the outskirts of Helsinki in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, restoring the house and workshop of Sara’s late grandfather. Their lovely garden framed by a suburban forest has been hosting ‘The Lightharvesting Complex’: the gem of an exhibition space in a small greenhouse where they cultivate zucchini, tomatoes and the artistic work of friends. Around the same time, Kaitlyn D. Hamilton and Joni Judén had moved to Joutsa, in the Central Finland region, and opened the doors of TUO TUO, an artist-led residency focused on ecological thinking. ‘The residency is really the cradle of this project,’ Victor admits. The long rehearsals, the road trips, and Joutsa’s beautiful nature give ‘magic to the process … our music has a visual character too.’

I want to make an argument for art as a space to exercise coalition. Researcher Emma Dabiri proposes ‘coalition’ as an alternative to ‘allyship’ in the context of organising against white supremacy: while allyship reinforces difference and hierarchical privilege, coalition relies on intersectional collective action – ‘We can start to tell new stories, rather than fall back into fault lines that were designed to divide us in order to better exploit us.’¹ Julia Fidder’s work insists that curating is always a practice of hosting. Whenever I enter the space of her exhibitions and events, I know I will engage in two actions and feelings: of witnessing and of being held. These activate a series of affective connections – introspection, self-recognition, active listening, questioning, communicating – that help us process and reformulate our personal experiences as simultaneously individual and social.

During the break, I cuddle up in Leik Silvestrini’s Lachrymatory, a textile nook in the middle of the dance floor. As one enters, a carpet of one-hundred soft teardrops invites the dancers to sit for a while. Silvestrini remembers the 2022 shooting at a queer bar in Oslo and the loneliness that queer clubs often hosted during the covid-19 pandemic. ‘Oslo mental hospital has a Blue Room, filled with mattresses, pillows and weighted blankets, where the patients could lay down and find comfort. I was wondering how such room could translate to a club setting.’ On a small round table in the middle of the Lachrymatory one can find an open diary and a UV light with the invitation to read and write. Something shimmers at the corner of my eye, and I notice faded text written on the sky-blue curtains. Hovering the light closer, words appear hand-written on the cloth. With the intimacy of a confession, I’m trusted with fifteen anonymous stories collected by Silvestrini. They tell of sexual violence and the void it leaves behind, the loss of a sense of self that is slowly rebuilt, the capacity to find a degree of self-acceptance despite pain.

‘I want to activate as many senses as possible, so that there is something beyond “logic”: something to smell, look at, touch, taste, hear. I inserted a flask of onion essence to induce tear production. Soap bubbles to make breath visible. Tea for a warm caress of the throat.’ A tear-shaped punching bag in petrol-blue leather hangs next to the Lachrymatory. ‘Tears are so politically loaded,’ Silvestrini notes how the act of crying accrues different value based on body politics and social stereotypes; ‘to me, rage and grief are connected.’ Soft, tight, holding, startling, piercing, and reassuring at once, Silvestrini’s participatory installation offers the time to indulge in the strength and resilience of our bodies and minds – to accept the anger boiling in our chest as we are reminded of the structures of oppression and repression – to cry that anger away.

YOUR HOPES, YOUR DREAMS, YOUR FEELINGS

LOCKED IN YOUR WROUGHT IRON STERNUM

TRY TO ESCAPE

YOU WON’T LET THEM

THIS IS NOT YOUR HOME

YOU GO WHERE THE WIND BLOWS

FIND OUT WHAT YOU ARE

DISSECT YOUR OWN HEART

AND FROM THE FLESH

MUSHROOMS FRUIT²

M LORE picks up from that anger and discomfort, closing the night with a VJ full of rage, euphoria and trans joy. The stage is dressed in the theatricality of a gothic church, celebrated by an androgynous character for their loved ones or for another part of themselves – the one labelled and erased by the gender binary. The smoke and flickering lights of this impromptu rave allow us some anonymity. Dear Society,’s events activate a third space – a private communal place – within a found community – those who respond to Fidder’s call to grieve together – in a space that should be public – art, music, food, culture. In other words, grieving together flips the coded behaviours of these artistic formats and venues into what we might want to understand as undercommons, with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney:

‘… what we (the “we” who cohabit in the space of the undercommons) want, it is this – we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls.’³

Dear Society, has showed us that being a witness to each other’s love, pain, loss, change and growth has the double-effect of allowing privacy for our internal labouring and offering the support of peer recognition – ‘the possibility of being alone without being lonely’, as Fidder puts it.⁴ Of loving and of change, grieving is a relational condition; it continuously demolishes and rebuilds the pathways to oneself and to others. A love that holds you by the hand, needy, estranged and familiar, grief is inevitably of the undercommons. ‘My grief stood beside me on the dancefloor like a block of concrete. This is the most acute example of dancefloor grief I can recall. I hope everyone’s grief-sculptures feel welcome at our club’, comments M LORE.⁵

Dear Society, hosts the many ways in which we can be companions to the rocky-loves of each other’s grief. Re-socialising grieving through ritualistic or ritual-like gathering is a political and a cultural practice exactly in the commitment to such companionship: the work of working with others, of formulating together what was broken, of finding a safer space within the structures that negate the reality of being broken while perpetrating the break. Club Grief has reminded us that one answer is the passion that grief carries as its companion.

SWEET SMILING MOONBEAM

SWEET SMILING MOONBEAM

BE MY RHAPSODY

BE MY RHAPSODY

SO DEEP MY LOVE!⁶

Bio:

Micol Curatolo is an art worker, curator and producer based in Finland. Her professional interest lies at the intersection of border politics, contemporary art, feminist and antiracist work. Her research explores movements and languages that mediate experiences of geography, labour, and migration. Often working collaboratively, Micol’s practice questions participation and presents processes, politics and aesthetics of constructing a sense of place.

Footnotes:
1. Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next (Dublin: Penguin Random House, 2021) p.26.
2. Lyrics by M LORE for Club Grief, 22 February 2025, Madhouse, Helsinki, Finland.
3. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (United Kingdom: Minor Compositions, 2013) p.6.
4. ‘Interview with Julia Fidder and M LORE’, Madhouse, February 2025 (https://www.madhousehelsinki.fi/en/ajankohtaista/haastattelussa-juliafidder-mlore)
5. idem.
6. Lyrics by M LORE for Club Grief, 22 February 2025, Madhouse, Helsinki, Finland.