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