Silent Table

“Silent Table” is a one-to-one ritual designed by Barbara Raes, co-artistic director of NTGent. In an intimate setting, grief over something that remains unborn comes to the surface.

In her workshop Beyond the Spoken, Barbara Raes, artist and curator, has been designing tailor-made rituals for years for anyone dealing with unacknowledged loss. In Silent Table, Raes works with each participant to create space for grief about everything that is unborn in a person, in a literal or more symbolic sense: not having children, grief over a lost childhood, grief over an ambition that may not be fulfilled, a desire that brings more restlessness than joy... What does a person need to let go of in order to find more peace?

Silent Table, a combination of an intimate conversation and creative forms of therapy, is an small scale but impactful ritual that offers a necessary counterbalance. In a society with an acute lack of rituals and a suffocating pace, it creates time and space for emotion, processing and connection.