EXCERPT For the last five years I have been reading, writing, and making work around lamentation. Lamenting is an extreme expression of grief in the form of a song or poem, practiced commonly by women across different cultures, from ancient times to the present. My own interest and understanding of lamenting focuses on its aspect of collectively voicing that which is individually unbearable, whilst simultaneously resisting it. In accordance with ancestral and indigenous insights into the role of the lamenter, where song and vocalisation become the middle zone that connects the realms of the living and the dead by inhabiting the zone in between worlds, I find in the lament the proper role of the audio essay: a ‘contrapuntal’ activity with generative powers based on ‘adjacencies’ and ‘discontinuity’.1 As I propose here, the audio essay negotiates the realm between aesthetics and ‘the social and cultural context’ in a way that resonates with the work of Edward Said. Artists such as John Akomfrah always remind us that, for ‘some identities’, collective suffering and audiovisual aesthetics are necessarily bound up with one another.…