Masterarbeit, 2022, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International Supervised by: Christoph Nebel Abstract Pneuma Lamentare’s project represents multiple attempts to understand the various aspects of grief and mourning: performative, feminist, political, poetical, and psychological. I started the project with the biography of my grandmother, collecting her stories about the act of lamentations and the burial rites in Morunglav village, Romania. Furthermore, I focused on the profession of mourning from different social and political contexts throughout history, continuing with a reenactment of the ritual of mourning through voice and electronic music together with Christa Wall. Due to our interest and feminist, activist view on folk customs, we extended the practice of mourning, reinterpreting it through a sound performance and an audio-video installation. Theorizing the ritual of mourning brings up various aspects that must be defined and revisited. Why is there still a need to open discussions about the ritual of death from numerous perspectives: philosophical, psychological, sociological, ethnomusicological, feminist, and performative? Many scholars and artists have already covered this need, but there is a necessity to continue the speech about the importance of the ritual of mourning in a world in ruins, that is undergoing an ecological and climate crisis, a war, and an ongoing pandemic. The discussion about grief can go further in the digitized world, where the practice of mourning has the potential to achieve a political shift within social media channels. The discourse on grief is vast, waving through different cultures and historical eras. I chose to write about ritualized mourning, focusing on the performative perspective, analyzing the poetry behind it and the importance of the social and political aspects of grief.

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