Mourning Home: Collective Futures in Los Angeles is a site-responsive performance collaboration between homeLA and the Thomas Mann House. Featuring Los Angeles-based artists Harmony Holiday, Brianna Mims, and Chris Powe, Mourning Home examines our collective grief and mourning. Through textual, sonic, and embodied storytelling, the project explores the convergent and divergent results of forced and voluntary migration as modes of survival. Centering the ongoing generational effects reverberating from the transatlantic slave trade of African peoples, these new performance works illuminate the precarity and resoluteness of the body under surveilled grief. By refusing isolationism, the artists offer public moments to wail, whisper and return to community nourishment. Here, we mourn the loss of home, known and unknown.  

Grief and mourning manifests in congregation, procession, and collective breath; collaboration becomes a mechanism for processing this gravity together. Ivie Obulor, Executive Director of the European Coalition of Cities Against Racism and a 2026 Thomas Mann Fellow, researches mourning as a social practice. We often understand mourning as something personal, an individual encounter, but her work opens up larger questions: how do communities mourn? How do cities hold loss? How might mourning help us recognize shared histories of rupture, displacement, and transformation? 

Collective mourning can be a spatial experience. homeLA and the Thomas Mann House share an investment in Los Angeles as a sprawling site of complexity. The city is shaped by the continual reimagining of what “home” can mean. The Thomas Mann House stands as a historical marker of intellectual refuge and cultural production—a place where artists and thinkers exiled by European fascism found sanctuary in Los Angeles and, from that position, produced new cultural and political imaginaries. Through California Modernist architecture - environments built for stillness, connection, and contemplation—space is carved out for memory, dreams and healing to coexist. These shared histories coalesce to deepen our understanding of a shared humanity, divining a future that fully acknowledges past violences and honors present communal processing to weave belonging into the next phase of our societal development. homeLA’s work centers Los Angeles as a layered, contested landscape, where histories of migration, and belonging intersect, shaping and reshaping the city’s cultural fabric. Together, we invite the visitors to the Thomas Mann House and all that are curious about moving through grief, to ponder if mutual emancipation is even possible next to the enormity of build-up and physical release that we call mourning. Bring your thoughts, ideas, and dissent as we as artist-citizens grapple with the notion of social transfiguration.