Project Description
Starting from their late mother's portable devices, Petrozzi and Casabona would like to have time to retrace their passage on the internet, and mourning both their physical and digital presence. Erasing old accounts, subscriptions, unread e-mails to let their digital persona free at last. The research part would manifest into a participatory ritual, which would invite and bring together anyone who experienced loss related to the digital realm, and reproduce a ceremony in which mourning can be witnessed, experienced and performed, through their mother's phones. Their aim is to unveil the complexity of our vulnerability online and the necessity to restore and heal our relationship with the internet and the digital.
Possible ways to expand the project
The dream would be to make this project into a public program, and a series of group meetings. The ritual would be the starting point and first iteration, and it would continue on the line of Grief and Data, inviting guests to speak, making up shorter workshops, and also re-iterating the funeral as a perpetual ritual.
Collaborations:
Drawing on the tradition of Ancient Greece and South of Italy of funeral lamentation, Petrozzi and Casabona intend to produce a funeral lament out of the digital material found on their late mothers' phones. Using words and sounds as an active material to make grief vocal, performative and a shared experience of catharsis.
Possible collaborators:
-Singing Club Rotterdam, or another choir from the Amsterdam Area;
-Alejandro Cerón, Music production for the ritual;
-A death doula from the Amsterdam area, to help and counsel on end-of-life transition;
-A videomaker to film and document the rituals;
Ginevra Petrozzi
Ginevra Petrozzi (Rome, Italy) is an interdisciplinary designer and artist currently living and working in The Netherlands. She completed her MA in Social Design from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2021, for which she received a Cum Laude, Best Thesis Award, and won the Gijs Bakker Award 2021.
Her work explores contemporary issues around care, futurity and algorithmic governance. Through critical research, writing and creative production she aims to make space for other ideas and forms of intelligence, knowledge and wisdom (both human, non-human and digital). Currently, she is exploring the possibilities of mysticism and the occult within the landscape of contemporary techno-politics. In this framework, she took the role of a “digital witch”, reclaiming the archetypal role of the sorceress as a healer, and as a political rebel.
She is part of the duo Xsenofemme, and has recently exhibited/collaborated with Stedelijk Museum, RAUM, IMPAKT Platform, Waag, MU Hybrid Art House, Het Nieuwe Instituut, World Design Embassies, The Hmm, Design Academy Eindhoven, among others.
Cecilia Casabona
Cecilia Casabona is a an interdisciplinary research designer. Her practice focuses on collective strategies of thinking and “doing otherwise” with a particular interest around the notion of productivity in the neoliberal west. “Doing otherwise” becomes an act of making, like the worker’s strikes, that enables to rethink the way humans (co)habit the world - even with critters other than themselves.
Her master thesis “Reading out loud. Polyphonic systems for a collaborative survival” focuses on the performativity of language for which expressing words becomes an act of doing-making. In her research, she questions the stories upon which we have built our beliefs and history and how we can unlearn what we have learnt: words can be engaged as a material to disrupt the anthropocene and story-telling approaches be used as a subversive instrument for claiming alternative ways of living.
Trained as product designer at Politecnico di Milano, she approached design research and criticism by attending the Master Critical Inquiry Lab at the Design Academy in Eindhoven. There, she developed her interests towards participatory performance methodologies. Some of her recent projects, in fact, include performances, workshops together/with and beyond the human.
Currently collaborating with Onomatopee Projects as Junior Curator and within the project Urne.rip as design researcher.
Estimated costs
Material costs - Total: 1900.-
The materials include what is needed for the months of research and the participatory ritual.
Artist fee - Total 4000
The artist fee includes Ginevra Petrozzi and Cecilia Casabona working hours for the research time and the particiaptpry ritual production and curation.
Contribution Choir 500.-
Contribution Alejandro Cerón 700.-
Contribution Doula 500.-
Contribution Videomaker 700.-
Total imagined cost 8300.-
This proposal is part of the 'Penny for your Thoughts' project 2022.
