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Paprika (working title) is the last piece in the trilogy of works addressing loss, it is still in its early research stages. The work has departed from the thought of the ecstatic edges of grief. Ecstatic having the capacity to literally mean the feeling of being outside oneself with both rage and grief. The work looks into the moment when grief touches the incomprehensible, and demands for a reordering of the sensible. The work will manifest the moment when things fall apart, when things no longer make sense and a new sense needs to appear. The piece is vibrant and works in multiple layers of visual overload, as if the world would manifest itself more in disaster. This layering will be composed together in close dialog with our collaborator, costume designer Lærke Valum.

This production has continued our collaboration with Queer Death Studies Scolar Nina Lykke (PhD). Her current research focuses on queer widowhood, death, dying, mourning and spirituality in queerfeminist materialist and decolonial perspectives. Nina Lykke became a companion of the trilogy during the making of Just ok. Together we widen from our personal experiences of loss, and unfold how they are intertwined with our cultural understanding of dead material and death processes. In collaboration we will enrich our understanding of loss, allowing a space of reflection across faculties and age. Nina Lykke will remain as a mentor and conversation partner to the work and the research will disperse into distinct / separate projects in addition to Paprika.

Paprika will provoke the structures in which grief is supposed to fit into. It spills out of the discreet, defined and orderly, reordering grief's timely and spatial relations.

Lærke Valum is a highly acclaimed Danish designer and currently a part of The Danish Art Foundation’s development program “Den Unge Kunstneriske Elite''. In her hands the body is expanded and protected by form, and the space surrounding the body becomes a place of experimental exploration. Lærke’s designs have an expressive and brave performative manifestation that will create colorful, multi-textured, and form-full costumes for Paprika. With Lærke’s design language we will allow the costumes to take over and change the form of the body. Valum shares the minimalist precision in her relation to form and Paprika will challenge this symmetrical relation in our artistic process and add yet another layer on our research on loss. The dances for the piece are selected from a filmed archive of improvised dances that hold different emotions and moods that later play out in a set choreography. We use a method of filming an abundance of improvised dances throughout the period of research. In succession the selected dances are learned meticulously from the videos. In this way they note down the context in which they were made; they amount to an archive of dances that hold specificity as well as sentiment that carries traces of years in coexistence with terminal illness, chronic pain, death, grief as well as friendship and humor. This kind of companionship allows our life-processes to be a part of shaping our methods, practices, as well as the material itself.

Initiating a trilogy on loss has offered a roof for the research on grief and helped us build a frame for developing our practice as well as growing as a duo. We have evolved through making sustained relations to collaborators as well as venues along this process. We have emphasized on creating a team around us that expands the work artistically and allows continuity between the three works. The residencies provide safe working conditions, foster dialogue on artistic sustainability, and help us meet the local community through workshops, sharings, and talks. The locations we work in are all artist-run institutions that work with the meeting between the personal, local and political, focusing on ethical ways of production and creating a space for questioning, reflecting, and re-imagining structural norms within a Nordic context. The specificity of these locations help us develop our work in a consequential and relevant way, they prompt conversations on the varying vulnerabilities and politics in the bodies at and of work. In this project we pursue to offer reflective spaces for mourning. Allowing a space where we do not seek for a resolution, but rather surrender to the unbearable feelings of loss in communal settings.