"actually, we're really sad": raya hazell on partying for crisis, gaming through grief, and alchemizing mourning

“when i interrogated my grief, i came to understand the world.”

everyone knows what it’s like to lose something, and what comes after: grief is a universal feeling, both personal and sometimes political. raya is a visual artist, grief facilitator, and digital designer who developed a unique practice blending digital spaces, ritualistic gatherings, and somatic experiences to help communities process collective grief. through her work—from the interactive grief garden to water-based ceremonies—she creates containers for mourning that transform personal loss into collective understanding and resistance. her approach more than simply holds space, it alchemizes grief into a tool for understanding the systems that shape our losses and the possibilities for healing beyond them.

below, we chat about how grief work emerged from raya's undergraduate thesis on climate change, her evolution from digital gaming spaces to ritual ceremonies, and her vision for making grief work accessible while staying true to its roots in serving marginalized communities.

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juliyen: how did you start doing grief work, and why was grief a theme you wanted to focus on for your practice?

raya: i was recently asked this question, and in answering it, i realized that the work i’m doing now comes from a lineage—i don’t think i ever started this work, but my practice has shifted and evolved into what it is now. grief as a topic, and as a focus, emerged during my undergraduate thesis. i was interested in making a game about climate change and questioning how play could shift someone’s critical consciousness. in the process of creating this game, my collaborator and i had to pause and say, actually, we’re really sad. doing this deep research about the state of the climate crisis and public consciousness was hurting us so we shifted to a focus on tending to the grief we were both experiencing. grief wasn’t a term i was afraid of, though. my mom passed away five years ago, and tending to that grief taught me how to move through the process.

there’s more to the story of how it shaped into what i’m doing now, but i think that creative work around grief really started with that project. it grew from a game and play into: can we make parties for crisis? over time, those parties became more and more choreographed until they turned into rituals.

juliyen: what forms do your rituals take?

raya: i’ll start with what the game ended up being and then transition into what i’ve been doing more recently. the game, in its first iteration, became what we, my collaborator kyle barnes and i (working together as tomorrowsoup), called grief garden. it’s still live—grief garden is essentially a digital 2d map-world where you move around using arrow keys. it’s a garden where people can plant little memorials. you can walk through it, open people’s memorials, read them, and leave your own. some of the elements even move around. it plays with this retro, web-blog, html aesthetic. that was the first space i created: a digital container for grief where play is still possible. the rituals i’m doing now are similar in that they ask: how do i create a container for grief? and how can play and somatics be part of it?

the last ritual i hosted was at princeton’s encampment, as part of the student movements in solidarity with gaza. while i was on the east coast, i returned to my alma mater to hold the ritual there. a lot of my rituals revolve around a medium or theme, and this one was very much about water. i won’t go into all the details, because those choreographies are things i hold very tenderly, but essentially, it asked: how can we meet water? how can water hold our grief? how can we hold each other’s grief?

juliyen: how do you define grief as a concept?

raya: grief to me is loss—it can be loss of a person, loss of a place, loss of a feeling, loss of relation, loss of hope, loss of land. for me, grief came from something very acute of losing a person, my mom, but then there’s the other side of my work in climate grief, which is this much more abstract, amorphous kind of loss—what damage has already been done, but also what we stand to lose. and now, i’m expanding this grief practice to doing work around genocide and mass death (or at least trying). it has been hard to figure out how to shape my practice based on what kind of loss i'm holding. the acuteness and viscerality of hosting around genocide has been a big learning curve, but it’s also central to my work that essentially is asking how do we address the unprecedented, compounding crises we live in at this contemporary moment.

juliyen: have you learned anything about how you personally deal with grief through this work?

raya: when i interrogated my grief, i came to understand the world. if i ask why my mom died—not as a grand cosmic question—but the material reality of it: as in what literally happened to her body—the role of the health care system, medical racism, growing up in poverty, and alcoholism—i understand that her death did not happen in isolation. what i've lost is intertwined with other people who have experienced similar loss. i've learned that understanding grief makes me feel better able to live a life in face of it.

my grief work and grief rituals are my attempt at helping people to name the root cause of their grief—for many, that comes to: settler colonialism, systemic racism, capitalism. i think if we can grieve together and identify these root causes, we can orient ourselves in collective resistance to the systems that perpetuate our suffering.

my mom was very blunt. when i lost her, i knew that she would not let me pity myself. she would have said something like ‘i’m the one dead, not you!’ i knew she would want me to get up and keep going; and so for her, i chose to alchemize my mourning rather than succumb to it. my grief-fueled curiosity to understand the world and its violent systems has helped me to understand how i have been wounded but also has allowed me to better celebrate the ways she, as a strong, black woman survived this world.

juliyen: i imagine there’s still a weight to this grief that you in part carry, despite the focus being in placing grief into containers. how do you deal with holding onto other people’s grief?

raya: i was reading a work about despair by the dunbar creek collective, a group of death workers. their guidance was really helpful in helping me know how to tend to myself because i am the site of my work in a lot of ways. you’re absolutely right. it doesn’t just pass through me; there is a weight i hold and continue to accumulate. i’m learning the importance of continuing to hold rituals just for myself.

and so, i have to pace myself in how often i host group rituals and be patient with how many people i can host. i want to do this well. it is a slow and intimate practice. more so, i’m trying to let the rituals be the container and letting the choreographies themselves move and hold the grief rather than myself, or my body, being the site where collective grief gets stored. i want to believe that public service doesn’t have to come at the expense of oneself. often, the deep gratitude i receive from those i host is medicine for any wounds i accumulate in the process.

juliyen: do you see yourself more as an artist or a therapist? how much do you center yourself in this work?

raya: i deeply hope that i am not centered; i try to be intentional about centering the mediums i’m working with—typically: water, soil, earth, sound. i’d say that i’m spending more time as an artist making the space. there’s a lot of set design: architecting ambient lighting, composing ritual materials, sculpting a space with smells and sounds. my role is more about guidance and acting as a witness. i’m not offering direct responses to people’s grief, just holding space as the site of alchemy. and i should clarify: when i say alchemy, i mean how we’re going to shift or transform the grief—ie: putting a stone in water and using that as a metaphor for asking the water to hold our grief. but like how the stone does not dissolve in the water, we do not wish to forget or dispose of our grief, not to dissolve it, we’re just asking for help to hold it, just wanting to put it somewhere outside ourselves so we can look at it and better understand it. it feels much more like an artistic practice or choreography for a sort of performance, although what happens on this stage is very real and we are our own audience. we are crafting stories to tell ourselves.

juliyen: how do you feel about conducting this work as a black woman? the way black women often carry the emotional weight of a community tends to go unrecognized, which is something i realized more in adulthood—I grew up with a single mom and it wasn’t until i was much older that i realized how much she had to carry.

raya: thank you for saying that, even that acknowledgment is so kind and definitely something that i have to hold more space for myself. i do have that tendency. my whole family is single black and brown women who are strong and resilient. it’s partly empowering, but sometimes there feels like an assumption that it’s how i have to be. that’s obviously intertwined with so many other dynamics that i don’t want to keep replicating.

it’s also where i am right now: i’ve done all this work voluntarily—sometimes i get residencies that come with stipends to help with costs (sort of)—but i am reaching a point where i can’t keep doing this for free. i still have to do other work to sustain myself. i think money is something people in healing spaces often feel uncomfortable about—I still need to figure out how this work that feels really essential can be spiritually and financially sustainable.

juliyen: what kind of support do you feel like you need? have you thought of ways to make it easier to ask for funds to continue?

raya: i feel like i’m at a critical point in this practice. like i mentioned earlier, i didn’t set out to create grief rituals as an intentional goal—it emerged from the work i was already doing in communities and through my art practice. and now, it’s working. it’s helping. i see how it brings people together in really beautiful ways, and i believe in it. i’m proud of it. but it’s also at this point where i need to figure out how to sustain it.

that’s where the tension comes in. promotion feels strange to me, because it feels like i’m relying on mechanisms of the same capitalist, extractive systems that i’m resisting. at the same time, there are real material needs—I want to build bigger, more intricate sets, explore light design, fabrics, props. i’m often making these spaces out of what i have access to, transforming my home or borrowed rooms into spaces for others. there’s so much more i could do if i had external support.

and also, if i can get funding externally—through grants, residencies, collaborators, or the public—then i wouldn’t have to consider charging people to come to rituals. that’s important to me. i could charge tickets, and i know it’s a system that exists, but i feel conflicted about it. i don’t want money to be a barrier to this work. for example, i went to movement festival in detroit recently. for me, house music, techno music, nightlife—these are black and queer spaces—but you put a $300 wristband on it, and suddenly the whole festival is white.

it’s the same with grief work. if i start ticketing it, who’s in the circle? who gets access? right now, i’m tending to black, brown, femme bodies, queer bodies—those are the people showing up, the people in need of these spaces. i’m scared to see how the demographics might shift if money becomes part of the equation. that’s why i’m so oriented toward grants and partnerships. i want my work to feel compensated and sustainable, but without putting up barriers for the people it’s meant for.

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“if people feel so kind as to directly support this work they can share funds via cashapp ($rayuhhhh) or venmo (@rayaward). my deep gratitude in advance.” — raya