Where we leave what holds us: on ritual, vulnerability, and surrender

By Raquel Loga 

As part of IE University’s Happiness Week, the dialogue that unfolded around Alicia Framis’s installation Leave Here Your Fears invited a nuanced reflection on the embodied nature of vulnerability and the socio-political architectures through which fear circulates. Far from offering a just a sentimental or therapeutic reading, the work intervenes directly in the phenomenology of fear, not as an abstract emotion, but as an organizing principle of subjectivity and collective life.

Framis’s proposal is deceptively simple: a physical site where participants are invited to symbolically deposit their fears. Yet beneath this gesture lies a dense network of anthropological, philosophical, and aesthetic questions. What does it mean to externalize fear? How does ritual function as a site of symbolic and material transition? And what are the ethical and political implications of designing spaces that hold, rather than erase, human vulnerabily?

Fear as intercorporeal transmission

One of the most striking aspects of Framis’s reflection is her framing of fear not merely as a psychological state, but as an intercorporeal phenomenon, something transmitted, inherited, and embedded in social and familial structures. Fear, she reminds us, is often less a direct response to danger than a learned response, absorbed through parental gestures, cultural narratives, and collective imaginaries.

This insight aligns with a long tradition in social theory that understands affect not as a private interiority but as a circulating force (Ahmed, 2004). Fear, in this sense, is not just what the individual feels; it is what moves between bodies, structuring how we orient ourselves toward others, toward institutions, toward the future. If fear is contagious, then it is also, necessarily, political.

The ritual architecture of surrender

Central to Leave Here Your Fears is the creation of a ritualized space, a site where fear can be enacted, materialized, and reconfigured. Ritual, as anthropologists like Victor Turner (1969) have argued, is not merely ceremonial; it is a performative apparatus through which social and existential thresholds are navigated.

In Framis’s work, the ritual is not about eliminating fear, but about displacing its ownership. By depositing fears into a shared space, participants enact a symbolic redistribution: the private is rendered public, the internal externalized, the individual folded back into the collective. This act does not erase fear; rather, it marks it, holds it, and thereby transforms its relation to the self.

Trust as a precondition of the collective

Framis’s comments highlight an essential ethical dimension: without trust, no collective life is possible. Fear, if left unexamined, corrodes the conditions of relationality; it generates suspicion, fragmentation, and defensive postures. Trust, by contrast, requires the capacity to risk, to make oneself available to the other without guarantees.

The installation’s ritual dimension can thus be read as an experiment in cultivating the preconditions of community. By asking participants to relinquish their fears in a shared space, Framis stages not a naïve fantasy of fearlessness, but a pragmatic exercise in relational repair. The collective is not imagined as a space beyond vulnerability, but as one sustained by practices that manage and metabolize vulnerability together.

Beyond contemplation: the ethics of participatory aesthetics

Framis’s shift from object-based to participatory art reflects a broader movement in contemporary aesthetics: the recognition that art’s power lies not solely in representation, but in enactment. Participatory art collapses the distinction between observer and participant, insisting that meaning also emerges through embodied interaction rather than just through passive contemplation (Bishop, 2012).

In this framework, Leave Here Your Fears is not simply a symbolic gesture; it is an operative practice. It generates conditions under which participants engage their own affective economies, renegotiating their relation to fear not through cognitive insight alone, but through embodied, material, and social engagement.

Fear as resource, not deficit

Perhaps the most radical aspect of Framis’s work is its refusal to frame fear solely as a negative affect. Rather than proposing its eradication, she suggests its integration, fear as a resource to be worked with, a terrain to be navigated. Echoing existentialist and psychoanalytic traditions, this perspective holds that what we most fear often points directly to what we most value; that within fear lies the contour of desire, of attachment, of meaning.

Well-being, then, is not defined by the absence of fear, but by the capacity to inhabit fear differently, to turn it toward hope, courage, curiosity, or relational depth.

Toward a politics of care

Leave Here Your Fears is ultimately not a project of resolution, but of redistribution. It does not promise that fear can be left behind once and for all. Rather, it offers an aesthetic and ethical infrastructure through which fear can be shared, re-situated, and held within a collective frame. Framis’s work invites us to reconsider the politics of care: not as the elimination of vulnerability, but as the crafting of spaces where vulnerability can be lived, negotiated, and transformed together.

In this, her installation gestures beyond the horizon of individual well-being, asking us to imagine what kinds of communal architectures we need in order to hold what frightens us, and in doing so, to open new possibilities for how we live with one another.

REFERENCES 

Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press.

Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. Verso Books.

Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine Transaction.