Interview with Julia Fidder and M LORE

Dear Society,: Club Grief is a club night for all grievers and friends, taking place at Mad House on February 22, 2025. We had the chance to interview the event's curator Julia Fidder and artist M LORE. The interview is only in English.

Image: Lennart Creutzburg

Mad House: What to expect when coming to Club Grief?

Julia Fidder:
Softness, loud music, safety, openness, tears, screams, hugs, dancing, resting, togetherness and the possibility of being alone without being lonely. We have two amazing music performances, one by Death by Landscape and one by M Lore as well as a participatory installation by Leik Silvestrini, however the essence of the club event will be coloured by the people who attend. I bet that if we will host Club Grief a thousand times, that it will look differently with each and every iteration. At its core Club Grief is about the grief we all bring there. Additionally there will be music to listen to and later dance or move to if you feel like it, there will be laughter and tears, the possibility to hang out with your friends or meet new people, a place to lounge or have a drink and visual input through video, light and a soft installation.

JF:
When thinking of Club Grief and the theme of tears or grief on the dancing floor, I think about my personal experiences with it. Often, my research has some kind of personal origin or undertone, especially when it comes to grief. From this personal sphere, I always try to bring it to an open invitation or a more universal story where there is room for the experiences of others. It is the same with Club Grief. Last year one of my biggest fears came to life when my grandfather suddenly passed away after he fell, while I was still living in Finland. Me and my brother, who was also living in Finland at the time, travelled home as quickly as we could but after his fall he wasn't responsive and we did not get to talk with him anymore. That week we spent with family, we went out to several parties, something I never do with that frequency. It made me think about the place partying and clubbing have within grief. 

I would like to invite one of the artists, M LORE, to join the conversation. M, what is your experience with grief at the club or on the dancing floor? Could you give any examples?

MLORE:
The first time I ever played my music live was to open for Drab Majesty and TAUT (Them Are Us Too). It was a hot, legendary, fully packed show at the DIY warehouse venue in Santa Fe where our scene lived. It felt like the beginning of something beautiful but was actually near the end. Soon after that I moved to Europe and my friend Cash Askew from TAUT died tragically at another DIY warehouse venue that was ominously named Ghost Ship. 

35 other people also died in the Ghost Ship fire - Oakland's deadliest ever. When you research it one of the first lines of text that pops up mentions how the warehouse was "unlawfully converted" into an art space. Art is illegal in the United States. So is being poor and trans. This is what killed our friends. 

During the aftermath of the Ghost Ship fire I was living in a new city and didn't have deep connections with the people around me. I had moved from a bubble where being a gender-defector made a person chic to one where it made me undateable and put me into constant battle with this one well dressed but evil administrator woman. 

My gay Greek curator roommate couldn't bear to see me and my grief sitting on our dead dog of a couch anymore, so he took us out. The club was crowded, the cocktails were expensive, and the acoustics were bad. 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.

Image: Carl Victor Wingren

MH:
Julia, you have an ongoing research practice related to grief, grieving rituals and the place they hold in our society. As part of this you have launched Dear Society, a grieving circle that takes place every two months and in which the public can come together to practice or witness grief. How has your research informed the forms that Dear Society's events are taking? How have the events informed your research?

JF:
I like how you ask this question in a symbiotic format, because it often goes both ways indeed. Regarding the forms of the events, it is really diverse in the ways of how they come about. One of the first events, with Anastasia (A) Alevtin, was born out of a dialogue. We had this beautiful conversation about a lot of ways in which grief can manifest itself and how these ways can intersect. (A) proposed a letter reading and afternoon tea as format for their Dear Society event, which felt right from the start. So I would say that half of the time the format stems directly from the practice of the artist. We go back and forth between the artist or artworker proposing a format and me inviting them within a format I feel connects to their work and the ways in which they work with grief. Other times, a specific line of research forms the inspiration for a certain event, as happened with Club Grief. 

One of the foremost things that I have learned so far from Dear Society, and that I will continue to research, is how personal grief or shared grief occur in a communal setting. Often, with Dear Society, each audience member brings their own grief. We hold space for this individual grief together, but it never happened before that within an event we were grieving for the same subject. However, last year I attended the last Lunga festival in Seyðisfjörður. Each year, the festival was brought to the small fjord on the island, but I happened to be there on the very last iteration. The event had an evident place within the local community and brought together a lot of people from all over Iceland. At the end of the festival there was a procession and ritual where we collectively buried a jar filled with everybody's saliva. There was singing, speeches and crying while we all stood in a circle around the burial site. This made me realise better the challenges in collective grief. When we are in a collective setting, but each engage with our personal grief, are we really grieving collectively? Or is there something we need to cross? An attitude we need to foster? A certain dialogue we need to have? I don't know the answer but I hope that through the events of Dear Society, where we practice grief in a communal setting, we can get as close as possible to collective grief where we don't have to feel a distance between our individual grief. So we can foster a space where all these experiences can accumulate and we can feel truly connected and held by each other.


Read more about Club Grief.