Lost & Shared: Rehearsing Collective Mourning in a Struggling City

Lost and Shared attests to years of work shaped as incitements to rehearse collective mourning. Drawing from her experience working with war survivors in Peru, Eliana Otta links her interest in human loss to her time in Athens, where in 2017 she encountered the word depression used to describe collective conditions. If depression relates to unprocessed mourning: what losses emerge from economic crisis and political disillusion? How can art help to mourn a political project, a relationship with time or nature? And how might shared mourning allow communities to transform their views on the economic and political?

This book approaches art making and research as ways of attending to and caring for others’ words, befriending theory and affective labor. It combines auto ethnography—chronicles written in Athens between 2017 and 2022—with poems made out of conversations with artists and activists, and scores for readers wishing to engage with collective mourning.