A conversation with Monika Weiss about the physicality of music, secret societies of alternative artists, impossible conversations, the marriage of sorrow and beauty, the revolutionary potential of lamentation, performance as ecstatic fulfillment, and healing through collective experiences. Born in Warsaw/Poland, Monika Weiss is Polish-American artist based in New York City, practicing internationally. Historian Griselda Pollock writes, Weiss’ artworks “have long solicited our attention to historical events: forgotten, remembered, not yet mourned, or immemorial” employing an “aesthetically intense, audio-visual musicality”. Originally trained as a classical musician, Weiss creates music/film installations and outdoor public projects/performances, often performing herself or choreographing others, especially women, in a symbolic act of ‘unforgetting’ in response to sites of shared trauma. In 2018, the city of Dresden commissioned Weiss to create temporary public art project commemorating the liberation and destruction in 1945. In 2016, curator Robert Storr invited Weiss to participate in an international exhibition at Stavros Niarchos Foundation/Athens, alongside Laurie Anderson and Shirin Neshat. In 2012, city of Zielona Góra/Poland invited her to create a temporary lamentation project with local women, on the grounds of the former German concentration camp for Jewish women, Gruenberg, today ruined and forgotten. As part of The Met series Artists on Artworks, a 30-min. film premiered in 2021, in which Weiss shared her insights on the work of Francisco Goya and reflected on her own transdisciplinary practice that evokes ancient rituals of lamentation, performed in response to tragedy.