Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat…Only that they held each other close, long after it was over.
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Basel-based violinist and performer Alicja Pilarczyk’s work undoes the boundaries between art disciplines, taking shape in, and through, the forms of composition, choreography and performance.
The founding member of Concept Store Quartet, a member of Vischer Project, Basel Sinfonietta and Zurich Symphony Orchestra, and a professor at the Academy of Art in Szczecin—where she gives a class in Contemporary Music and Chamber Music—Alicja’s past collaborations, much like her own practice, have traversed the spaces of dance, music and visual art.
corpuscle (noun)
cor· pus· cle ˈkȯr-(ˌ)pə-səl
1: a minute particle
2a: a living cell
especially: one (such as a red or white blood cell or a cell in cartilage or bone) not aggregated into continuous tissues
b: any of various small circumscribed multicellular bodies
What takes shape, is changed and/or affected, when one thinks of and about grief as a minute particle — as a living cell.
Is it the forming of an understanding that, like cells, grief is a basic building block of life? That all living things or organisms are made of grief, in the same way, that they are made up of cells. And this, because all living things or organisms, are in some relationship with love and as bell hooks wrote in All About Love, “To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending. The way we grieve is informed by whether we know love.”
Corpuscle is Pilarczyk’s project inspired by a personal tragedy she endured in her early childhood, with the loss of her father in a fatal car accident. The abruptness of the event and loss, cast a looming shadow on her life, returning recently as a question about grief and meditations on ways of dealing with loss. In Corpuscle, Alicja aims to find the threads that connect the living with the dead, a thread which she feels has become very faint in the western worlds and logics.
Through conversations and sharing of personal experiences and cultural practices, Pilarczyk hopes to gain a deeper understanding of grief and different processes of saying goodbye, as she travels Kenya, moving through Nairobi and Naivasha, Mombasa and Kilifi on the coast.
Below is a conversation between Alicja and I, about her work, research process and the minute particles of grief.
Lindiwe Mngxitama: Your research trips to Nairobi, Naivasha, Mombasa and the coast of Kilifi, form part of the process of developing your work/project, Corpuscle.
Can you tell me more about the project—what it seeks to explore/meditate on, and what inspired it—furthermore, why these particular geo-political and cultural spaces—Nairobi, Naivasha, Mombasa and Kilifi—were chosen as research sites in its development?
Alicja Pilarczyk: The inspiration to work on Corpuscle came out of a long talk with a friend, where I realised that I had been seeing life through lenses that were shaped by losing my father at an early age. I started to see that on a subconscious level, I was trying to find a physical connection to my father, that I longed for something that was taken away from me. As I started to look into myself more, I found that in my grieving process, I hadn’t had the opportunity to properly say goodbye to the physical presence of my father. He died in a car accident, and I only saw the coffin.
My research is therefore very connected to the fact of dealing with detachment. The missing part of my own grieving. It is in Kenya where I conduct my research and this is for a few reasons. I know a little about the country from my previous research trip in 2021, where we worked with artists on the Kenyan coast, on a project about empowering women. I am mesmerised by the colourful traditions around many aspects of life, so it felt obvious to me that I would go back there and learn about traditions and ceremonies surrounding death.
I didn’t want to limit myself to the coast only and that’s why my research takes place around the country. The second reason I chose Kenya had to do with the fact that I was already working there throughout February of this year as a visiting professor at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, working with students in the music department. So, I found it a great opportunity to use my time here and discover more about this very special melting pot of cultures. The final reasons I chose Kenya were more personal and had to do with being in contact with local artists from these cities, but also out of curiosity.
Lindiwe Mngxitama: In a piece, I penned last year titled “Waiting to exhale | a millennial playlist for moving with Grief” I wrote:
When it comes to grief and moving with it — there is no one way, no linear path or magical equation — there is no soothing balm or chicken soup for the grieving soul. Instead, there are waves upon waves of overwhelming and undoing feeling.
This thought was provoked and inspired by Joan Didion’s writing in her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, that:
Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms. Sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of ‘waves’.
How, or in which ways, would you say you have come to know, understand and/or give language to grief—both as a state and as a feeling—through the early loss of your father and through the process of developing Corpuscle?
Alicja Pilarczyk: Grief has appeared in my life in many ways.
It’s only recently, and after working with a great therapist, that I have realised how big an impact it has had on me. As a teenager, I was not conscious at all of the fact that what I was feeling was grief. I think that children learn how to build a safe space around difficult subjects. My safe [space] was to denial.
It’s interesting to think of grief as waves, however, I must admit I have not experienced it in that way. It has been like a state of constantly erecting a fence, with the fear that if the wall breaks, I will not survive. All these years later, through working on Corpuscle but also through my therapy, I have come to observe that the trauma of losing my father, had been magnified any time there had been a chance of parting ways with a close person. The process of building this project has been a scary one, and consciously juxtaposed with searching in other cultures, getting to know other people’s experiences, and using what I have learned to refill my old map of grief with the missing tiles/patches.
Art has always been my first instinct to express something. It takes different forms, although I am a violinist. The performance for which I am conducting my research will take the shape of musical theatre, and its language will be an integration of several means: sound, music, spoken text, scenography, video, pictures, and costumes. I hope that my research in Kenya will give me material to express myself better.
Lindiwe Mngxitama: Liminality, as a concept was introduced into the field of anthropology in 1909 by Arnold van Gennep in his work, Les Rites de Passage. Van Gennep described the rite of passage, such as coming-of-age-rituals and marriage, as having the following three-part structure: separation, the liminal period and re-assimilation.
I often think of grief as an embodied event/state of liminality, in that, a grieving person can be thought of as moving through that same three-part structure: separation—physical and emotional—is felt through the loss of a person; there is induction into the transitional/liminal period; and then there is re-assimilation into society after “healing”. However, at the same time, I find that analysis is limited in how it seems to frame grief and grieving as a feeling or state with a final end. From my personal experience, there has been no end to the grief I have felt rather, there has been a gradual calming of the waves, through turning towards the grief, and through fostering continued practices of remembrance and healing as monuments to house my grief.
Where Corpuscle is concerned, is its relationship with thinking through grief, one with a final destination, is it attempting to arrive at the answers by the time the final note is played? Or does the work of thinking through grief sound even after the curtain is drawn?
Alicja Pilarczyk: Very interesting question, and it’s also useful for my own thoughts around the performance.
In fact, I don’t aim for the performance to have a summarising point, instead, it is presenting a process.
After a few weeks in Kenya, I have started learning about several cultures, and what I found surprising—and am envious of—are their ways of relating to the deceased’s body. There are many rituals which treat the body as if it was still alive, by giving it “the last dance,” having the last dinner with the dead, by dancing, playing and singing next to the coffin as a way of saying goodbye and chasing away evil. There are also many customs aimed at making sure that the body is not alive anymore and that the evil spirits have left it.
These traditions are very far from my central European, Catholic, experience. From participating in some of these rituals in the past weeks, I realised that I am looking for the performance to be a practice of finding peace through the process. I think that the most important part is finding peace. Calmness is not equal to letting the memory of the person go, or letting the hole in your heart be covered. I wish to build in my soul a sanctuary in which I will be able to meet the trauma and not be scared anymore.
This story is produced in the context of an editorial residency supported by Pro Helvetia Johannesburg, the Swiss Arts Council.
Photograph by Emilia Łapko
