We are artists, scholars, and community workers from the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in Addis Ababa, the Institute of Social Work and the Department of Creative Arts at the University of Dar es Salaam, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Across three gatherings in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), and Vienna (Austria), we explored how our surroundings are shaped by extractivism and dispossession, and how artistic practices can foster care, witnessing, mourning, and also an imagination of worlds beyond extraction.

Through a form of critical autoethnography, this study diffracts aspects of the author’s artistic practice through the intimate process of mourning to delineate a particular mode of knowledge production within artistic research that queers the relationship between the inside and outside of epistemic and ontological perspectives. The first section considers the abyss as a figure between grief, the unknown, and modes of knowledge production within artistic research.