LEBENSMOSAIKE
Eine soziale Kunst des Gedenkens
Lebensmosaike will bring friends and strangers together to form new communities; facilitate peer support, inspiration and creativity; and celebrate a departed life with bespoke artwork that will be hung in a public space and so become part of its community for many years to come. The Toolkit we will produce will make our methodology available world-wide.
Our motivation stems from personal biographies combined with a pressing concern for our communities. Like many around us, we have experienced bereavement during COVID-19, and found the grieving process more difficult. The limited contact in the last days of life, the inability to say goodbye as most would have wished, the social isolation and loneliness of the bereaved due to the restrictions, and the lack of social gathering, all played their part. But even before COVID-19, people died of illnesses, like Shir's husband died of AIDS. Since then, she has been developing new community rituals, and using theatrical elements to offer alternative mechanisms for processing grief. We are deeply motivated to take advantage of this rare opportunity of changing times to explore and design proactive and innovative ways to meet the human need for meaningful and enriching grief work in a community context.
MEET THE TEAM
SHIR FREIBACH
Artistic Director & Project Manager
Shir is a performance maker and collaborator based in London, working in both Performing Arts and Participatory Arts sectors. She is an award winning Director and Dramaturg who also works as Writer, Translator and Mentor in Europe and the Middle East since 2002. Since 2014, Shir has been combining her work in the arts sector with a lifelong commitment to human rights activism, through devising and delivering bespoke participatory arts projects with refugees, adults experiencing homelessness, Roma communities, marginalised people, people accessing health and mental health services, young people not accessing work or education, and young people experiencing difficulty with speech, language and communication skills.
Shir believes that artists and art organisations have a civic duty and a role to play in their communities, and is invested in making creative projects that seek to benefit disadvantaged individuals and compromised communities – while always striving to be artistically and socially ambitious.