After working as a programmer in the arts for about fifteen years, Barbara Raes completed her training as a funeral celebrant. She has spent the past couple of years conducting research on the development of new physical and mental spaces for farewell rituals. In 2016, she founded Beyond the Spoken, a workspace for unacknowledged loss, where she creates new farewell and transitional rituals with other artists.
                    
                
Heike Langsdorf: Through working together last year in the frame of your project Beyond the Spoken—workspace for unacknowledged loss, I discovered some elements and characteristics that seem present in both of our processes. While I would propose to call these elements ‘building (on)’, ‘mentoring’ and—on a more general level—‘proposing through doing’, the characteristics could be described as ‘nonchalant’, ‘caring’, and ‘politically engaged’.
                    
This nonchalance (here I am mobilizing only the positive connotations of the word) of building on existing rituals and practices without following a strict lineage of masters, I recognize in my own work. It is sometimes cri­ ticized—never without reason and always by people who invest a lot of time and money in becoming acquainted with a certain practice—for not respecting the original scores of the authors. Aware of this critique, I learned to productively ‘check myself’. Indeed, I am obviously not shy to ‘build (on)’ practices, yet at the same time I care very much about from where the things we do originate. I guess I want to continuously find out more and more about how practices relate, how they came into existence, and how they are transmitted. At the same time, I want to try things out more spontaneously based on my many years of practice as a dancer. In the 1990s and 2000s, when ‘practice’ was not yet an umbrella term, we received multiple influences from different teachers who gave workshops at schools for both their bread and their passion. They all had very idiosyncratic styles—something that was praised rather than critiqued—that were compiled from existing (often very old) techniques and schools of thought. In recent years—and I agree that there is a lot of over­simplification when taking over elements of profound practices—it has become a delicate thing to build on an existing practice.
                                   
Personally, I feel that when exercised with a lot of care, such building is absolutely tolerable and, to my understanding, even a political necessity: it enables us to feel bound to, free with, and aware of, existing lineages. Such a paradoxical attitude of being simultaneously light and concerned brings not mastery, but clarity about what is at stake. With care comes acknowledgement, and, through the latter, there cannot simply be a ‘stealing’, but always a ‘taking further’, a ‘further thinking’, made possible, importantly, through practicing. 
                    
Another characteristic that I believe I share with you is a reluctance to developing an oeuvre, and, instead, an urge to ‘find ways of living’. Maintaining an artistic practice is—at least in my own life—the very orientation I can name when it comes to belief. I definitely still put trust in regularly returning to a certain (more or less precise) activity, something that is—for the sake of repetition—commonly understood as belonging to the realm of the ritualistic. At the same time, we could say that the concern with ways and forms of living belongs to a sort of political care­taking; building practices can be considered a hands­on response to a world yearning for repair and seeking to avoid more damage. In this sense, it transcends the personal and private. 
                                
The rituals you make with and for the different people who contact you represent, for me, a very curious intersection at which a sort of curatorial care­taking and artistic practice meet the socio­economic and political sphere. Completing your training as funeral celebrant, you transitioned (after working as a programmer for about fifteen years) into building and maintaining a(n artistic) practice that deals with unacknowledged loss. Practically speaking, you take the dramaturgy of burial ceremonies further, and, when seeing you in dialogue with people,
 I notice a strong and paradoxically lighthearted, yet very aware, demeanour.
                        
First question -- is this paradoxical attitude of being con­cerned with lineage and yet feeling very comfortable trying things out, for you, a way to practice political engagement?
                        
Sébastien Hendrickx: It’s a very complex question. Maybe we should unpack it.            
                        
Barbara Raes: Let’s start with the political engagement. Until very recently, for me, being politically engaged had to do with a very active attitude: I had the feeling that I had to respond to every possible incentive that called out injustice and addressed ecological and socioeconomic crises. I thought I had to do that publicly in order to have an impact. Next to the large­scale problems, I felt equally responsible on a personal level for people in crisis. Now, I understand that this kind of form of being politically engaged is quite exhausting. It’s something that we do to ourselves, somehow. Reading The Burn-Out Society (2010) by German­ Korean writer­philosopher Byung­Chul Han made me understand what was happening to my own psyche. I was exploiting myself. I was the one thinking I had to respond to all these incentives. Today, I can very honestly say that I still feel very politically engaged, but my activities are proportional to the circle of influence that I can actually have. So, I no longer feel the urge to act or to make statements in a circle where
 I feel I don’t have any impact, or where there is a constraint for me to change things. So instead of this ‘with everybody and the whole world’ approach, my engagement and way of working is now much more intimate. Through one­on­ one encounters, I enable change for one person, and I hope that this will affect others.     

Sébastien Hendrickx: You’re envisaging a ripple effect? 
                                           
Barbara Raes: Indeed. There is a personal, almost private, trajectory with one single per­ son, but the moment we do a ritual there is a temporary community to share it with. This group will value what happened and spread the word on both an intellectual and an energetic level. I feel that this kind of political engagement is much more valuable to me, which doesn’t mean I can’t respect different ways of making an impact. I can imagine that for other people with other relations to power, other ways connect more to their professional life, or to how their character works. In the end, both methods of creating impact will bring change. Transition to a more sustainable society will come through different experiments by individuals and larger collectives. The timing is unpredictable, but I deeply hope there will be a moment where this combination of all these different experiments will take us a step further. 
                    
Sébastien Hendrickx: A diversified critical mass... 
                    
Barbara Raes: Yes, I believe in the strength of this diversity. Something will click at a certain point because of very different people being engaged with very different topics on very different levels, but all with the same long­term aim. That said, people practicing now might not yet see whether their activities will be valuable at a later point. 
                    
Heike Langsdorf: This might relate to lineage, and to the fact that we’re always in another moment in time within different dynamics. But it doesn’t mean people ‘before us’ didn’t try to find schools of thought and practices or ritualistic behaviours related to the question of how to live a (good) life. So, in that sense, we need an awareness of the fact that this search is not just ours, in our always apocalyptic nowness. This is an ongoing search of human­ kind, and who I am to say it is not for other species? I be­ lieve that experience accumulates. We need to listen to the successes and failures of experiments that are being done elsewhere or have been done by others before us. There are countless chances to learn from what others have been trying and proposing, and from there to see what political engagement can be now. What Barbara mentioned about the proportional degree of influence one can have is interesting. If I can understand power as a proportional thing, I can know that I cannot reach ‘whatever thing’, but that I can achieve ‘one certain step’. It feels fruitful staying within this diameter of where the steps we make can resonate, instead of practicing something that is evaporating before it touches ground—acting in total vain. 
                
Barbara Raes: We shouldn’t only base ourselves on theoretical sources, but also on the practical experiments and research that has been done. I believe that the information of those who came before us is somehow inside us.
                        
Sébastien Hendrickx: The collective memory is stronger than the collective oblivion?
                        
Barbara Raes: I hope so. We can build on earlier practices. We can think them further. We don’t need to try to reinvent what has al­ ready been found.
                        
Heike Langsdorf: A collective memory can always be found back in practices that have been transmitted over time. If we take this seriously, our attention goes toward thinking life and how it can be organized, helped, and taken care of, instead of struggling for personal recog­ nition. Transmitting information through practice enables intergenerational relations. I would call that sustainability.            
Sébastien Hendrickx: Within the body practices you deal with, Heike, there are some masters. There is some authorship involved. To ‘use’ things from a certain practice can be criticized because they belong to a certain ‘oeuvre’. In Barbara’s case, I have the impression that it has more to do with a broader cultural line­ age composed of mostly anonymous, and often non­Western, cultural traditions. This problem of authorship is not so much at stake here, is it? 
                
Barbara Raes: What I try to do within my practice is to answer a certain ‘emptiness’ that I feel people experiencing today. All these practices or rituals exist because we need them.
 We are ritualistic beings. But rituals disappeared from Western society from the sixties on because of secularization, individualization, and the evolution toward an overactive society with no time for con­ templation or “in­between time”. That created a kind of emptiness, but it didn’t mean that subjects like forgiveness or reconciliation or other things that people could find in religion disappeared from our society. Personally, I think that the need for new or alternative rituals can be seen in the larger context of transition and a sharing economy. We search for more ‘togetherness’; we need to be together
 and to feel that we belong to a certain temporary community. We are living in times in which we do realize that we cannot live without each other. We need each other to be able to flourish. We are never alone—never ever. We always depend on each other, and this kind of togetherness shows what we miss when rituals do not exist, because togetherness is one of the basics of rituals. Another reason that there is more need for ritual practices is the abso­ lute need for silence, for slowing down, for trying to truly implement this in our ways of living—not radically choosing a life in which everything is slow and silent, but trying to have two sympathetic parallel worlds. On one hand, we have to function in a society that has the rhythm of our times; on the other hand, we can create oxygen bubbles to be able take care of ourselves. As practitioners, we can give people we meet ‘in practice’ the possibility to merge these two worlds. But your question was ...?
        
Heike Langsdorf: Cultural lineage.        
            
Barbara Raes: The way I work with people is actually very down to earth. I don’t relay where my practices stem from through lineage. I don’t talk about it with them, unless this interests them. All kinds of rituals from other cultures are present in my research, but they are not an important source of inspiration for my own practice. They exist, and I know them. Only if I feel the necessity for the other to hear more about certain references, do I give more expla­ nation. As you mentioned, I did this training for funeral ceremonies. On the first day, we had to watch the process of a body burning in the crematorium. To face our own deaths. The second day, we had to frame for ourselves what our values in life were. It may seem like a very simple question, but we needed a full day to find out what our framework was. The theory was that if you want to take care of people that are in mourning, experiencing sadness, or confronted with death, you have to be able to create space for them. That means that you have to know what you stand for, in order not to project your vision on the other, but just to stay close to “this is my belief, these are my values, this is what I think that happens after death”. The image I always see when I have an intake conversation with someone who asks for a ritual is that of a container holding the space. I have my own box with my values, my beliefs, the things I find important. It’s quite small. The other has his or her own confined space. Only from that acknowledgement can a meaningful practice or ritual be generated. The structure I use is the general structure of a funeral, even if not all rituals are about death. Everybody can recognize the general dramaturgical flow of a funeral. It’s universal. I don’t have to explain it. They know. Their body knows. It’s repetition. It has been done before. If we want to speak of something that is universal, here it is. All rituals have three phases: separation, transition, and reintegration. And so it happens that we are engaging with lineage without naming it. 
                
Sébastien Hendrickx: It seems that what you are saying also connects to the third element of this first question, which is about concern and care versus nonchalance, in     the sense of being comfortable with just trying things out. The rituals you develop are not only site­ or situation­specific, but also relation­specific. A person comes to you with a specific question, and from the ensuing relation, you build a ritual together. Such a relational process must involve a lot of care. How do you relate to this other pole, to the nonchalance or the ‘freedom of trying things out’?        
Barbara Raes: I think this attitude of strength and lightheartedness (the word Heike uses and that I find so beautiful) is really important for creating trust between myself and the person I work with. What they expect from me is empathy, which I can­ not have completely as I cannot understand all types of sadness and pain. There are always blind spots. Even with the kinds of sadness I know intimately, I will always have my blind spots. However, there is the natural expectation of empathy, and I cannot, of course, create a symbiotic relation with this sadness. So, the relation is one of closeness, being close, be­ ing side by side. Of course, being overwhelmed is unavoidable from time to time, as events, processes, and experiences can be very demanding. Then, the other pole is important: the ‘being strong’. People need this side, too, because they have to trust that I can take care of them. If I am only lighthearted and empathic, being a friend, let’s say, I cannot carry them through all their sadness. If I am only concerned or worried, I have no energy left to breathe, listen, and build what is necessary. For me, there is the freedom every time anew to search for the appropriate attitude between caring and holding. 

Sébastien Hendrickx: Is the combina­tion of intimacy and proximity, on the one hand, and distance, on the other, that makes a professional, or rather practical, relationship possible with relative strang­ ers maybe also what enables the experi­ mentation? Because when you’re too overwhelmed by intimacy, I can imagine there’s a lack of liberty to move and try things out.