A COLLABORATIVE, INTERACTIVE, BALANCING ACT
Grief as an experience, and not as a conclusion.
Most of the time we are discouraged from sharing and showing grief, especially in communal spaces. Even more when we cannot easily point to a specific moment of loss–of before and after. We are in a time of extinctions. Too many to count, too big to understand, too small to notice.
This art installation was created as a space to share some of our collective experiences with grief as it relates to the theme of climate crisis. Through conversations and art-making we came to this form of an interactive mobile that invites you to engage with different questions, themes, and experiences of personal and shared grief.
Grief as a tool.
What have you already lost, what are you scared to lose? Following our grief can help us identify things that are important to us, and what we need to fight for. Sometimes, the things we are grieving are the things that we havent lost yet.
Grief as an antidote to forgetting.
In our collective grief, it’s our responsibility to keep stories alive for each other: stories of people and places lost, worlds better than this one, pathways through this nightmare.
Collective grief can bring us together, make us remember the things and people we have lost, and what we are fighting to protect. In a world designed to make us forget these things, our grief is our humanity and can act as a bridge to form deeper connections of care in our communities.
This project was created collaboratively by a handful of artists and makers. It is messy and imperfect and full of contradictions. It was created with love, rage, sadness, and our shared desire to make something beautiful together.
“Grief is a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying”
— Donna Harraway
“Learning to die as an individual means letting go of our predespositions and fears. Learning to die as a civilization means letting go of this particular way of life and its ideas of identity, freedom, success, and progress.”
— Roy Scranton
— Donna Harraway
“Learning to die as an individual means letting go of our predespositions and fears. Learning to die as a civilization means letting go of this particular way of life and its ideas of identity, freedom, success, and progress.”
— Roy Scranton
PRAYERS FOR A LIVING DYING WORLD
Rachel Dunlap How do we prevent community paralysis in a time that demands urgent change?
ORANGE AS A BIRTHDAY TREAT
Ellie Zimmerman + Dio CramerI bite into a knifed-out wedge of a Cara Cara orange, the pink kind bred for less acidity. The juice rockets out of its cells, some landing in my mouth and some down my chin, on my hands, dripping to my wrists. It is a summertime sensation, this dripping. It reminds me of ripeness and fullness and light. But here it is dark, far from this orange’s California home. Here it is quiet and monochrome white. It smells like snow and now citrus. It’s my birthday. The day is special but the orange is not. I do this every day, the knife in orange, orange in mouth, juice dribbling shamelessly routine.
My high school math teacher, a quietly terrifying Polish woman, told our class once about her childhood Christmas tradition. She and her brother would each receive one orange in their stockings. After tearing the peels off in ecstasy, they wagered a contest to see who could make their orange last longer. Always the more patient, disciplined older sister, she usually won, triumphant in her ability to savor the fruit. But she couldn’t hold onto it forever, and as the last sweetness faded, so did that year’s Christmas, and began the long wait for another moment of citrus joy.
I wonder what other sweetness she found during those long winter nights. One day, when produce flown on refrigerated airplanes from Florida, California, or farther is a rarity, I too might have one annual orange. I’ll save it for my birthday, save up for it if I have to. I’ll peel it delicately, not wanting to damage the gift wrap. It will be a celebration every time.
WHAT HAPPENS TO OUR MEMORIES WHEN THE PLACES BECOME UNRECOGNIZABLE?
Conor CusackThe coast is where I see my mother most herself, least troubled-content to walk down to the cover in the pouring rain to admire the washed up jellyfish and collect shards of common shells as if they were a perfect sand dollar or shining abalone.
Whether through dislocation, gentrification, or disappearance, the climate crisis has meant the distortion of extinction of places. “Place” being more than a physical, ecological formation. It includes people, our interactions, our histories. So as places disappear, mutate, or become inaccessible, what happens to the relationships and memories that are embedded in them?
Write on a card the memories and connections to people and place that are at stake for you in this moment. What people and places cannot be separated from each other? What places do you need to access certain memories? What people do you need to access the full experience of a place?
ON MOVEMENT
Rebekkah S.I am grieving our autonomy to move; to animate ourselves. Polluted air, zoonotic diseases, contaminated water, and
jeapordized food access all compromise the way we physically navigate our lives.
Very little gets in the way of a bouncy ball in motion. They move fluidly with little resistance--they almost can't help it. I would love to take this journey as a bouncy ball; complications from the climate crisis take away our abilities to do just this.
How do you feel when your environment limits your autonomy?
ON RASPBERRIES + SALAMANDERS
Ray Gorlin“These were raspberry fields and salamanders- thousands, everywhere.”
I grew up in Hopkins Minnesota, and this is a quote from my 90 year old neighbor Sharron Steinfeld, who spent most of her life living in this neighborhood. She spent most of her life living in this same place, and was describing to me all of the raspberry fields that used to cover the area, and how all the salamanders would fall into the window wells of the houses where they would collect them as children. I have never seen a salamander in our neighborhood and have always wanted to.
BONES
Jonas Goonface“Instead we fight, hopeless, to tear our lives away from that expanding horizon and to erupt with wild enjoyment now.” - Bædan