Griefscape | Runway

Home

Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.

Griefscape
Lamisse Hamouda and Han Reardon-Smith

“Some things seem too big to be felt alone because they are”

– Prentis Hemphill

We’ve been turning out for a year now, voicing our rage to a growing crowd of familiar faces, trying to find ever new ways to manage the escalating horrors we continue to witness; skinned raw by the inequity of vulnerability made visible through proximity to direct violence, all while the punishing terror of confronting our own powerlessness to stop. help. save. change. seems to overwhelm us. We live between sprinting into action / outrunning out own disorientation; obsessively mobilising, organising, data-gathering, intellectualizing, disassociating, documenting, archiving, and donating to make it make sense: to make it

Stop.

For this moment: don’t organise. don’t run. don’t distract. don’t swipe.

Sit with it.

Here is your grief.

Sit with it.

What might have escaped your attention while urgency so completely ruled your nervous system?

What ruptures in the narrative might emerge when you listen to the lungs crack?

When the lump is not swallowed, but bursts?

What cracks form in the stronghold of Empire when you attend to the heart?

Entangling wordings and soundings together in embedded media, our piece for “Groundswell” rests on breath to explore affective experiences and struggles in this time of genocide and resistance, and the unyielding grief that closes all paths but through.

Click on each song title to listen to the track. Each song will play through, returning to the background breathing audio

Lamisse (she/her) is a writer, poet, and workshop facilitator.

Her first book, The Shape of Dust (Pantera Press, 2023), co-authored with her father, Hazem Hamouda, delves into her father’s experience of being a dual citizen imprisoned abroad. The Shape of Dust won the 2024 National Biography of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Award. Lamisse has been the recipient of a Creative Australia Literature Fund and a Regional Arts Development Fund, and she has run creative writing workshop through Queensland Writers’ Centre, Emerging Writers’ Festival, Melbourne Writers’ Festival, QUT’s Carumba Institute, Inala Wangarra, Story Factory, and the Institute for Critical Race Research. Based in Magan-djin (brisbane), Lamisse is a member of AWADA (Australians Wrongfully Arrested and Detained Abroad) and an Adjunct Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, UNSW Art and Design & Architecture at the University of New South Wales (UNSW).

Han (they/them) is a white settler of Welsh and disconnected Turkish heritage, and is a musicker, radio/podcast producer, community organiser, and thinker-scholar living on the unceded land of the Yuggera Ugarapul and Turrbal Peoples. Their work and thinking are rooted in queer/trans and disabled collaborative and contaminative co-creation, exploring the emergent possibilities of making-kin and finding agency within community (soundmaking as kinmaking: musickin).

As a flutist and electronic musician, Han plays solo under the moniker cyberBanshee, and with Magan-djin’s radically inclusive symphonic pop collective Matt Hsu’s Obscure Orchestra, as well as improv and experimentation trios Rogue Three and It’s Science And Feelings. They are one of the community organising thinker-troublemakers behind the Brisbane Free University, its Radical Reading Group, and its 4ZZZ community radio and podcast offshoot, the Radio Reversal Collective. Han works as a postdoctoral research associate to Wiradjuri trans/non-binary Professor Sandy O’Sullivan on their project Saving Lives: Mapping the influence of Indigenous LGBTIQA+ creative artists in the Centre for Global Indigenous Futures.

Digital: Athanasios Lazarou
Editorial: Georgia Hayward, Akil Ahamat

Note

Click on a title to listen. The audio track will play through in full, before returning to the background breathing audio.

Click out of this text box to fully immerse in the work.

Loop Background Audio

Audio Description

A slow, crackly voice breathes intermittently in the background.

Breathing Sand (To Carry a Mountain)

Read audio transcript

You Bury Me

Read audio transcript

Lung Labours II

Read audio transcript

One Ragged Breath

Read audio transcript

Grief Gulp

Read audio transcript