Andrew Galvin is a PhD student at ATU Sligo, specializing in creative practice as research. Their work delves into the intersections of grief, grief processing, embodiment, ritual, and masculinities through devised theatre. As a playwright, poet, and performer, Andrew has showcased their work at prominent festivals in Ireland, including the Earagail Arts Festival, the Scene + Heard Festival, and Electric Picnic. Andrew holds a BA (Hons) in Sociology and Politics from ATU Sligo and an MA in Politics and Sociology from the University of Galway. Currently, they are developing the play "Grief Eater" with the support of the Arts Council and the Scene + Heard Festival.

If we view decolonization as “recognising, challenging and ultimately dismantling power structures that oppress the colonised” (Lamoureux, 2022), then as artists we must surely acknowledge and work to transform the internalised power structures that separate us from our storied selves; the grieving loss of the colonised identity and culture that interrupts the natural flow of personal and societal mythmaking. With a view to reclaiming and reconnecting to marginalised narratives and epistemologies this paper asks what does that loss have to teach us and how can we approach and access its lessons?  

This paper draws together the methods and approaches of devised theatre, sociology, and ethno-mimesis to construct a transformative space of vulnerability and receptivity that can be harvested for creative practice and also opens the possibility for speculative fabulation and imaginaries that can produce ways of being and knowing that trouble colonial power structures. Utilising ideas of grief as method, psychogeography, and topographies of grief this work explores the space of transformative potential that emerges through techniques of defamiliarization, intentional embodiment, and focused receptivity. In the combination of these methods the researcher becomes receptive to the margins and draws out and recentres that which was previously excluded and undervalued.

A grief cartography session then can be viewed as an absorbed ethno-mimetic engagement with unacknowledged grief and loss. During a session the participant walks a space while following a particular method: all the while documenting their movements and impressions. The reflections, photographs, voice notes, movement maps generated from each session are then worked through dramaturgically, and from this process emerges themes, characters, text, tone, etc. From here we have the materials to devise theatre that reconnects our myths and stories of self-knowledge and fosters personal and political transformation.