Permission to grieve

How much is grieving an action put into motion by societal frames? In Buddhist Laos one is not supposed to cry or show emotions of despair as it is viewed as bad luck. In Catholicism, mourning is seemingly a formal and sombre affair. Elsewhere it can be a celebration. Can a state of grieving truly reflect a person’s individual need? What is it you grieve? Who is it you grieve? Why is it you grieve? Influenced by the experience of my father’s European funeral and my mother’s East-Asian cremation, Permission to grieve is a way of finding my own voice of mourning and hence the sense of a new found identity. I am sharing my breath through anecdotes about the things I mourn, and with my body I search for a state of being that can accept and move on. This is an intimate meeting between my cultural heritage and who I am today, it presents a proposition for the public to be involved in this process and to question the notion of how we are possibly bound and shaped more profoundly by societal traditions than we think.