Multispecies Mourning / Collecting Bones my Partner Consumes, Turning Them Into a Porcelain Urn

Sculpture, Installation, Photography
Porcelain, Bone Ash, Bones, Bone China, Fine Art Print
Time: 2019

Exhibition View, CCA Temporary Gallery, Cologne

Mourning is about dwelling with a loss and so coming to appreciate what it means, how the world has changed, and how we must ourselves change and renew our relationships if we are to move forward from here. In this context, genuine mourning should open us into an awareness of our dependence on and relationships with those countless others being driven over the edge of extinction. (Rose, VanDooren 2013)

In "Multispecies Mourning" I transmute the physical remnants of my partner's meat consumption—the bones—into a bone china urn. Disrupting the boundary between consumer and consumed through the artistic process as well as through its product. The process started with the question: can my partner and I live together despite differing ethical beliefs and actions? And how? I started to explore these questions through an entangled artistic process and an attentiveness to our intricate entanglements with the non-human life we ingest.

Multispecies Mourning II x CIRCA: 3D-animation based on 3D-scans of calcined bones of farmed animals. On show as part of the CIRCA x Agnes Denes programme, Piccadilly Lights, London. 2022

Industrial use of bones is opaque: photographic film and paper, cellular concrete, matches, sandpaper, pigments for painting, bullets, and ‘extra calcium’ yoghurt are examples for more or less unexpected encounters with processed bones. The use of bones in porcelain is an European tradition originating in 18th century England. To produce porcelain, the country needed materials it could not source by itself or in its colonies. Kaolin—also known as china clay—, was one of these materials essential to the production of porcelain. The painter Thomas Frye began substituting it with horse bones — highly available at this time in England. Bone porcelain started as an affordable and abundant alternative to porcelain. Over time, it culturally transitioned into an aesthetic pleasure, a luxury good. Finely ground bones make the porcelain especially robust, translucent, white. But the bones are never visible.

In most restaurants my partner and I visited, the bones were invisible, too. Trying to get the corresponding bones of the meal my partner had – or any bone at all for that matter – was impossible. The bones seldomly find their way into the kitchens of today. However, upon others a Chinese restaurant in Vienna, where we lived at that time, could provide us with the bones connected to the soups my partner ate. I documented them (one particular photograph is part of the installation I set up in Berlin) and conserved them on ice until the cremation took place. Later in the process, my partner helped me out by asking for the bones.

In late 2018, I prepared the first bones for cremation. The smell was too strong and the smoke too poisonous, so the firing had to happen over the weekend when no one was working at the studio. The numerous sets of either sheep or cattle bones were being calcined at 1000° Celsius. Before the burning, the bones were dried using a flat heating curve—one hour at approximately 80° Celsius. After 6 hours in the kiln, the bones had transformed into white bone ash.

Bones in the kiln at around 200° celcius, at the beginning of the heat curve that leads to full calcination.

Grinding the bones after calcination by hand instead of using industrial processes and machines for pulverisation.

The bones transition from their normal condition and a greyish colour to a charred and finally calcined state. During cremation, there are processes of deformation and fragmentation due to heat-induced shrinkage, as well as chemical modification due to combustion and pyrolysis of chemical substances. The degree of modification increases with rising temperatures and includes degradation of DNA.

The grinding process, being meditative and exhausting at the same time, gave me time to think about the individuals’ remains I was working with. Would I deal with these bones differently if they were human? My mouth and nose are getting dry. Fine bone dust is entering my lungs.

Exhibition View, Meinblau Projektraum, Berlin

Detail Urn, Exhibition View, Weltkunstzimmer, Düsseldorf

For me, like for VanDooren, my work is not just about mourning. It is itself an act of mourning (VanDooren 2014, p. 126). In just not giving up the animals’ remains to be forgotten, but instead working with them, merging with them, becoming part of a mourning-process that is still ongoing while telling these stories about the dead and dying.

FEATURES

Exhibitions

Crazy about Meat, Museum Brot und Kunst, Ulm, 2024
We , Animals, Meinblau Project Space, Berlin, 2019
Practices of Approximation, CCA Temporary Gallery, Cologne, 2019
Goodbye Cruel World, It’s Over, Weltkunstzimmer, Düsseldorf, 2019

Conferences

Minding Animals Germany Symposion, 2019, University of Arts Berlin, Germany
The First International Queer Death Studies Conference: Death Matters, Queer(ing) Mourning, Attuning to Transitionings, 2019, Karlstads Universitet, Sweden
Thinking Species — Austro-Canadian Animal and Media Ethics Conference, 2019, University of Innsbruck, Austria

Publications (known only)

Paganini, Claudia. „Multispecies Mourning“. Die Trauer um nichtmenschliche Tiere. In: Leidfaden. Fachzeitschrift für Krisen, Leid, Trauer 4 (2021), S. 35-38.
Paganini, Claudia. Trauer als Protest. Zeichen setzen gegen Unrecht und Gewalt. In: Datterl Monika / Guggenberger Wilhelm / Paganini Claudia (Hg.): Friede – Gnade – Gerechtigkeit. Im Spannungsfeld zwischen Institutionen und persönlichem Engagement (theologische trends 30). Innsbruck: innsbruck university press 2020, 237-253.
Ullrich, Jessica. Erdlingsgeschichten. In: Blöß, Janine / Hörner, Ute / Antlfinger, Mathias (Hg.): Goodby Cruel World, It's Over. Köln: Verlag der KHM (2020).

LIST OF OBJECTS

Urn Bone China, Incl. Top and Bottom Piece, 130 × 130 × 180 mm
Urn Industrial Porcelain, Incl. Top and Bottom Piece, 130 × 130 × 180 mm
Plaster Casting Molds
Plaster Positive
Calcined Bone Fragments: No. 01, 105 × 61 × 66 mm; No. 02, 116 × 84 × 41 mm; No. 03, 70 × 70 × 86 mm; No. 04, 130 × 40 × 25 mm; No. 05, 85 × 90 × 65 mm; No. 06, 145 × 20 × 25 mm; No. 07, 80 × 62 × 29 mm; No. 08, 65 × 6 × 25 mm; No. 09, 66 × 35 × 15 mm; No. 10, 25 × 16 × 6 mm; No. 11; No. 12; No. 13; No. 14; No. 15.
Bone Ash (Spodium) in Round Bottle Glas, 50 × 50 × 115 mm
“Crystallized Bones”, Fine Art Print, 210 × 290 mm
Grinding Bones, 4K 4:3 Video, Stereo, 3:45 min.
Artist Book with Documentation