This year’s lament retreat at Earthwise Residency invites you to explore group laments, recognising how our individual sorrows and collective grief are intimately connected. Together, we will experiment with shared practices that honour this interconnectedness of grief, while also making space for individual lamenting.

• Our guiding theme this year is grief as community building: an invitation to reconnect, to remember and “re-member”, to tend to the broken or forgotten threads within ourselves and between one another.

• This is the fifth lament at Earthwise and for the first time, we welcome newcomers as well, offering an entry point into this work without prior experience in laments, singing or grief work. The only requirements for participation are an inner need to learn lamenting, capability to witness others in deep emotion (without intervening) and allowing yourself to be held in the same way.

• What is Lament?

• Laments are a global genre of traditional music. The earliest signs of laments are found from the Egyptian hieroglyphs that have a specific sign for a lamenter. Laments are still a living tradition despite centuries of suppression. They are found intact in islands of Greece, eastern parts of Romania, Karelia, Middle East and among indigenous cultures from Amazon and Africa to Papua New Guinea. Presently, we live in a time of revival of these traditions in Finland, Karelia and Ireland while in some parts of the world the suppression
  continues.

• Laments are a musical expression carried by emotion. They often combine melody, poetry and natural tears. Crying is not forced, but laments are made out of topics with a strong emotional need. They are made out of anything that we know will make us cry.

• Laments were tied to rites of passage – traditionally to death and marriage. In both these events a community faces a loss of a member and thus there are two rites of passages at the same time. For the one who transcends and for the community that needs to deal with the immediate changes. Specific ritual laments took place in order to have a secure and healthy transition.

• But laments were also used outside of communal ceremonies. All of us live through a series of personal rites of passages. Laments have been used to assist in those as well; recovering from trauma, releasing emotional burdens, gaining new perspectives to difficult situations.

• In our times, laments have been used to deal with ecological anxiety and solastalgia also. The general use of laments in arts and performances has increased, and its potential as a tool for protest and social change is being rediscovered.

Tuomas Rounakari //

• Our host, Tuomas Rounakari, is an internationally acclaimed violinist, composer, ethnomusicologist and educator. He is a versatile musician ranging from avantgarde improvisation to folk-metal, from contemporary classical music compositions to film scoring and sound design. His Doctorate of Arts thesis (2024) from the University of Arts in Helsinki, discusses the altered states of consciousness and the ability to engage in dialogue with the more-than-human, the natural world around us, through music. The case study in his thesis centres around the Bear Feast traditions of Finland, Karelia and the indigenous Khanty and Mansi people in Siberia.

• Tuomas Rounakari has been a key figure in the revival of the near extinct lament tradition in Finland. He learned the essence of laments from the Karelian elder Martta Kuikka, who was the first to bridge Karelian lament tradition and modern-day Finland. Subsequently, together with Pirkko Fihlman, Tuomas Rounakari developed a model of teaching laments in grief circles that allowed the participants to create their unique laments and be witnessed in their grief. During the past 20 years of workshops and ceremonies, Tuomas has been birthing and witnessing over a thousand individual laments across continents.

• When:

• Friday, 20th of February at 15.00     to      Monday, 23rd of February at 12.00

• IMPORTANT:

• You MUST confirm your participation with Natasja at info@earthwise.dk, only then will you be able to purchase a ticket.

• Accommodation:

• If you purchase a standard ticket, your ticket included accommodation and you will stay in a single or two person room at our residency house, Kirkesletten at Earthwise. If you have questions or special needs regarding accommodation, please inform Natasja at info@earthwise.dk.

• Limited spots available.
• Should the retreat be fully booked, please reach out to us, so we can let you know if we host a second weekend of lament.