In January 2025, we caught up with Lynne Cooper—Cultural Mediator, Mum, Spoken-Word Artist, Actor, Clown and Community Outreach Coordinator for Castelier, the Montreal Puppet House. Along with her artist colleagues of Le Trunk Collectif, they embarked on the Cosmic Procession of Farewell, which was featured in our December 2021 issue. Since then, the annual cortège continues to touch hearts and draw communities together through what Lynne describes as “our common denominator”—loss.
Although the project has taken on different shapes, the key components of art, music, food, and writing remain the conduits through which the artists hope pain, loss and grief can lead to individual and community healing. Martha Wainwright’s community space, Ursa, hosted the 2022 version called the Cosmic Cabaret of Farewell. The following year, her colleague and fellow artist Carmen Ruiz organized the 2023 Cosmic Open Mic of Farewell. After taking a 3-month leave of absence from her regular job, with support from the Conseil des arts de Montréal (Le CAM), La Maison de la Culture Claude Leveillé, along with a bit of crowdsourcing, Lynne and her band of fellow artists at La Take Out Lab mounted their biggest Cosmic Farewell project to date.
From November 1-3, 2024, La Maison de la Culture Claude Leveillé in Villeray was home to The Museum of Grief (Le Musée Cosmique de l’Adieu). Described on her GoFundMe page as “a whimsical funeral procession, a cabaret, an art installation . . . and a community altar all centred around the theme of death,” the project sought “. . . to bridge cultural traditions and personal grief, weaving a tapestry of shared human experiences.” La Take Out Lab collective includes artists Carmen Ruiz, Ellana Tryanksy-Kent, Robert Lopez and Damien Nisenson. The Soeurs Terreurs contributed their Telephone Booth project, along with many other collaborators.
Prior to the Museum’s opening, Lynne worked with children from 2 Montreal-area schools in the context of the Culture in the School Program. Lynne explored different cultures and traditions related to death from around the world, which involved showing “. . . the big structures in Afghanistan and Pakistan where they leave the bodies to the birds so that those bodies can go off into the sky,” and “the Ganges River, where bodies are led into the water.” She shares that some in the classroom found these new concepts puzzling but says the kids were “also intrigued by these different ways of other people exploring death or living with their grief,” adding that “we often don’t talk about grief here and I also introduced the concept of physical death, but also every day, we live different griefs. Our friend doesn’t want to be our friend anymore, or our body grew and we’re grieving our childhood, or we lost a toy . . . and how that grief often informs who we are. We don’t have enough spaces to accept those, and I believe a lot that our anxiety is unexpressed grief, so it’s teaching the kids also that grieving is what we need to do and it’s okay.”
Lynne recounts that during her workshops, she asked the children “to do family trees, starting with them, the names of their parents, their parents’ parents, and to go from there, as far back as they could go.” The trees were important symbols because as Lynne illustrates, “when somebody dies, it’s like part of that tree falls as an image, but the roots stay anchored. The tree got felled but the root is still there.” The children then “went back home and had those conversations with their parents, and a lot of the parents came to the show and said, ‘Thank you for sparking those conversations with our children because they are losses we just carry on our shoulders but of course, it’s part of (our childrens’) stories.’” The children were then invited to decorate the windows at La Maison de la Culture with poems and family trees as part of their contributions to The Museum of Grief.
Many visitors to The Museum of Grief shared how they would like to see it benefit others by having it “pop-up” in different places. “Right now, we have the paintings that were developed for the (Museum of Grief) project, which come with a QR code that you can scan to listen to poems that inspired the paintings,” explains Lynne. Having catalogued the many art pieces, including pinatas and photographs from past Cosmic Processions, Lynne would like to expand The Museum of Grief to include a website and a coffee table book to share. For the moment, she is planning for The Museum of Grief and Cosmic Procession of Farewell to be held annually in Montreal in early November.
You can keep up with the Lynne and the Cosmic Farewell projects on her events page.