Notes on Holding Space

Featured in The Death of Me, Oct 22- Nov 20, 2022

On Saturday we had the absolute privilege of attending the opening of Hypofuture’s Death of Me exhibit which includes our original piece Holding Space. We’ve spent the last couple of months deep in process around this piece and all that it has revealed to us. We wanted to share a sneak peak with all of you who have been foundational in the creation of Holding Space and also some words we’ve been gathering to describe the process of creating it.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for all of your submissions/contributions, all of the vulnerability and honesty that you shared with us. Your words were essential to the creation of Holding Space. Thank you for joining us on this journey and for trusting us with your grief. On opening night we watched in wonder as people slowly read each one of your words and found the courage to share their own grief and let it be held alongside yours. If you are in New York City and wish to visit it in person RSVP to Hypofutures. There are also several incredible artist-led events happening in the space over the next month including an in-person Death Cafe with Resham next Saturday October 29!

We love this community and we are so grateful. We could not have created this without you. 🙏🏼

Vision Takes Physical Form

by Eliana Yoneda

Resham and I met in the summer of 2021 when we were both acting as student guides for Going with Grace End of Life Training. She emailed me after one of our group meetings where I had spoken about integrating ancestral traditions into death care and honoring that we all come from somewhere whether or not our families have held onto these traditions (by choice or force). We got to talking. Meeting one-on-one. Ideating on the intersections of grief and creation, love and growth, death and change. After our tenure as summer student guides ended we continued meeting. I don’t remember when or how these meetings became consistent, but by the winter we were meeting every couple of weeks just to check in, see where we were at in our death practices, acting as witnesses for each other’s process. 

Living on opposite coasts, we didn’t meet IRL until the spring of this year. In that first meeting we walked around Lake Merritt brainstorming ways to bring others into our ongoing conversations. Not long after we started hosting monthly death cafes and then this newsletter was born. 

At one point Resham sent me a call for submissions on instagram: The Asian Arts Initiative in Philly was putting on a death related exhibit, should we submit? Even though the turnaround time seemed daunting and/or impossible we both thrive on deadlines and decided that it wouldn’t hurt to try. Deciding to try gave us the permission that we needed to think beyond our current creative contexts, dream together towards a way to give our words physical form, build something outside of our bodies. The ideas poured forth, we trustingly followed the flow. Ultimately the piece we submitted was not accepted, but the momentum we built through this process meant we were already in motion towards the creation of Holding Space. 

Truthfully, we had started building toward this moment from the second we chose to say yes to the three muses of life, death, and grief. Yes to our individual and communal practice and process. Yes to being witnessed. Yes to trust. Yes to the unknown. When we were approached with the opportunity to participate in The Death of Me exhibition we said yes again. 

For the last few months we have been in the throes of creation and experiencing the waves of emotion, self judgment, elation, and satisfaction that come with it. Throughout we have held the vision for Holding Space, an interactive grief altar that allows each participant to witness themselves within our collective experience of grief, honoring our coexistence. 

Holding Space is a question: how do we hold our grief? It is an invitation into conversation and a landing space for the answers that might arise. It is a reminder that we are not alone. It is built of devotion, forgiveness, release and acceptance. It is a labor of love, much like this newsletter and we hope that you are able to come experience it in person. 

Marigolds and Partnership

by Resham Mantri

In January of 2022, I found myself calling several Hindu temples in Queens, New York searching for marigolds in the middle of winter. None of the temples had any leads, and when I explained to the priests who answered, that I was a death doula assisting a Hindu family in their funeral and cremation services, I mostly got awkward silences followed by quick goodbyes. I had reached out to the priest hired by the funeral home working with the family and offered my help to gather the items necessary for the ritual. The list itself was a thing of beauty including fresh coconuts, mangoes, paan leaves, and haldi, in addition to several bunches of fresh marigolds. He sent me to Newark Ave in Jersey City, New Jersey, their Little India. In the back of a tiny shop with various ceremonial items a woman brought out a large ice cooler with marigolds packed fresh flown in from India.  I bought enough to make 3 garlands and my mother and I strung them up for me to take to the death ceremony at the funeral home.  I remain grateful to this priest.

I’ve always had marigolds around me and only recently really started to notice them in my life. They are widely used in prayers, altars, weddings, and funerals within India and the larger diaspora. 

Really if I think of almost any Indian ritual I have been a part of I cannot extract the memory of their sun orange glow. 

This experience was one of the seeds of the creation of the current work which will be on display beginning October 22nd by Eliana Yoneda and myself in the group show titled The Death of Me.  Wanting to truly explore the power, the meaning of this flower in the particular arrangement of the garland was one of the questions I kept returning to.

I had read a piece by Taymiya Zaman called Chasing India in Mexico City last year that began my thinking of how complex the relationships between colonialism, marigolds, Mexico, ritual and India were.  As she writes: 

“Marigolds, once ceremonial flowers for Tlaloc, the god of rain and water, crossed the Atlantic and made their way to India, where they are now offered as garlands to a different set of gods. The history of these flowers, tangled with colonialism, is everywhere and nowhere, accessible only if you search for it, and irrelevant because they bloom past it all, offering us nothing but beauty and its twinned aspects of transience and transcendence.”

All these inspirations are one thing. I am a Gemini through and through in that my head is buzzing, it always has been. I rarely need a high because I’m often high on my thoughts about everything.  Which is why creation has always been fraught for me.  My brain lingers on the thinking because it thrills me. Then the questions about How? rise up, trying to be helpful, but questions sometimes slow down or stop you. When are we truly ready? What is the point? Why create? For who’s gaze? 

Which is truly why I love thinking about what are those conditions by which art is actually made? How does it come to be? How do we create a body of work that lives? How does the process of making change the concept you once had? How does the process of making change us? For this work, it would not exist outside of the collaborative projects of Eliana Yoneda and myself.  Within this partnership, this art project blossoms. Eliana dreams in a way that feels like family,  says yes from somewhere deep inside that one can recognize but hardly identify.  In this partnership we have begun to hold us both accountable to the details of those Yeses. To the details of those dreams. For people who speak all the time, we barely seem to talk about continuing or not, it seems hardly to be a choice for either of us to do this work. To keep creating death cafes, The Community DeathCare Digest, and all our art /grief /love /death / Holding spaces of existence.  We may not know exactly where it will all lead, but we very much hope you will meet us here in this moment.