A HYBRID FRAMEWORK FOR EMBODYING AND WRITING CURATORIAL PROCESS
Editorial Note: Within the larger context of The Curatorial Thing, SixtyEight Art Institute’s gathering of arts professionals in Copenhagen, a two-year project on climate grief has resulted in a new book and several showcase events that will be incorporated during the 1-8 October 2022 programme. The following commentary results from the collective development of a project curated by Heidi Hart, called Climate Thanatology. Hart found the inspiration for this project as a participant in the 2020 edition of The Curatorial Thing. Since then, the Climate Thanatology project has grown to include collaborators in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the UK, and the US, and has resulted in a book of the same title, a hybrid curatorial-academic memoir of the construction and delivery of this project.
SixtyEight has invited Henriette Thune to review the book. Her research into intersubjective aesthetics informs her writing, since Thune was also a key contributor to the gestation of the Climate Thanatology project. The account below vividly models SixtyEight’s practice of creating frameworks for research and publication related to exhibitions and educational events.
“Earth may have her Gaiac agency, but she never set out to invade and pillage her own fauna just to prove a point. Our planetary-scale destruction will not kill her, but it leaves us and many other species fighting for our lives. What we do with what remains is the most pressing question of our time.”
Are crises constructive? They certainly do not appear as such when you are in the middle of them. But as existence is a state of ongoing change, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, crises often on the most unexpected levels become the backdrop against which new ways of being in the world emerge. The new book Climate Thanatology traces one process of responding to crises in a creative and collective way.
During the pandemic in 2020 musician, researcher and curator Heidi Hart found herself in the creative surroundings of The Curatorial Thing (the curatorial-intensive program of SixtyEight Art Institute in Copenhagen). Confronted by the climate threat daily in her home state of Utah, USA, Hart found that the critical, creative context of The Curatorial Thing inspired the idea of Climate Thanatology. In response to flooding, burning, fleeing, and other irrevocable planetary changes, Heidi Hart imagined curating a project that could find a way to "grieve the loss of the world as we know it."
This project developed in relation to her music thanatologist friend Catharine DeLong and their joint engagement surrounding their approaches to grief and worry for the planet. Climate Thanatology as a project took root in the idea of extending "the practice of music thanatology, or end-of-life care, using harp music that responds to a patient's breath and heart rates, to places of environmental stress and related human and nonhuman losses."
Music Thanatologist, Catharine DeLong on The Great Salt Lake, September 2021. Included in the publication Climate Thanatology by Heidi Hart, RSS Press, 2022. Photos by Victoria and Joe Felt.
Two years later, the Climate Thanatology project opens the workshops and events of the 5th Edition of The Curatorial Thing, taking place from 1-8 October 2022 in Copenhagen. The introduction of this project will "inform discussion of the roles of grief and embodied arts in radical adaptation to a warming world, as well as of art histories of mourning in an ecological context." These events take place shortly after Hart's book Climate Thanatology was published in August 2022.
This book, designed to “document an artistic laboratory in practice,” is structured in four sections. The book reflects on contextualized grief and how music thanatology has led to the new idea of “climate thanatology.” Materiality, tactile sound and acts of transcription create room for “creative mirroring” and the fundamental action of migrating, on several levels, to become something new. In her personal and situated account of the project, Hart draws on the theoretical and practical knowledges of phenomenology, intermedial ecocriticism, grief studies, and philosophies of the climate crisis, in addition to exploring a deep awareness of inequalities and her role in them. Hart’s book shows awareness that whether between species, imperializing versus colonized groups, ethnicities, and medialities, or among ongoing crises such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the climate refugee situation – these patterns of the more or less privileged repeat with implications for the planet at large.
Migration is a recurrent motive in Hart's book as she continuously, while writing, is on the move from one home to another, not materially in terms of houses (although that, too), but emotionally and geographically to the places where she has roots: Denmark, Utah, Sweden, Germany, Norway, and North Carolina. As she moves geographically, so does she emotionally and intellectually as a person, thinker, curator, and activist.
Hart's book reflects on the end of the first stage of the Climate Thanatology project journey, which she has organized over the last two years – sparked by the pandemic's abrupt learning that Zoom activity may also open for working together creatively over long distances. Hart summoned a little group of five to the first Zoom meeting in fall of 2020. The group included:
Music thanatologist Catharine DeLong (US).
Visual artist Anne Louise Blicher (DK/IT).
Climate writer and activist Ash Sanders (US).
Heidi Hart (US/DK).
And I, a health sciences, humanities, and aesthetics researcher, Henriette Thune (NO/DK).
The global grief and healing snowball started rolling from these meetings, recruiting new resources that have come to be a part of and continue to nourish the project.
After a series of meetings, and as new collaborators were invited in, the sessions became presentations by each artist and discussions of ideas for projects taking form. Using what resembles a “snowball sampling method,” the project expanded by employing its own network. This way, Henriette Blakstad (NO) of HenBlakstad Productions and the Animalske Produksjoner group (NO) (with Anne Mali Sæther and Guri Guri Henriksen) were involved, along with sound art duo silo portem (Simon and Gillian Young) (Scotland/UK), visual and performance artist Julia Adzuki (SE), graphic designer and artist Lana Neilson (US), and project intern Signe Schirrmacher (SE). The project has had valuable input from ecology consultants Evan Hart (NO) and Jack Greene (US), who have presented on threatened species and related biodiversity stressors. Additional contributors in poetry, technology, photography, and curation add to the project as well.
Music Thanatologist, Catharine DeLong on The Great Salt Lake, September 2021. Included in the publication Climate Thanatology by Heidi Hart, RSS Press, 2022. Photos by Victoria and Joe Felt.
As it became clear in the Summer of 2021 that the project would be incorporated as part of SixtyEight Art Institute's The Curatorial Thing in Copenhagen, Hart assured the collaborative group that Climate Thanatology would have a pre- and an afterlife beyond this meeting period.
The project has included sessions of the Death Café for the World as We Know It, both physically and digitally, in addition to site visits, among others, to the Bear River Massacre Site in Utah, where Darren Parry of the Northwest Band of the Shoshone Tribe shared indigenous histories of mourning and land restoration efforts. Music thanatologist Catharine DeLong brought her hospice harp and played a unique composition in response to the event and her family history in the area, captured on video. Hart's project-accompanying book is already a reality, as will be a digital archive, interviews, and articles following The Curatorial Thing.
Hart writes in her book about DeLong, the project's professional grief companion, on the move with her harp at the dying Great Salt Lake, while creating room for DeLong's own subjective experience of it:
'The videography team takes off ahead of me, and I follow – pushing, pulling, and carrying the harp at least half a mile over various versions of sand – none of them friendly to 30 pounds of harp on wheels. (…) I arrive at the water's edge in a state of exhaustion, and I'm reminded of my Mormon pioneer ancestors – religious refugees – who in 1847 claimed this seemingly barren land for their own, never mind the Ute, Paiute, Goshute, and Shoshone nations dwelling there.' (DeLong, quoted in Hart, Climate Thanatology, 2022)
Catharine DeLong invests her body, in motion with her harp, from alongside the hospice bed to the edge of the dying lake, engaging in a dialogue with nature. This process occurs while being on the move, in crisis, responding to new conditions and in unexpected collectives, where environmental hope and empathy may spark or surface. When scientific data (despite its indisputably clear message) is not enough, this process embodies many layers of what the Climate Thanatology project is about for all its participants, artistically, emotionally, intellectually, as living beings.
'Finally, setting fingers to harp strings, Catharine tried to apply her music thanatologist's sensory awareness to the beat and respiration of the lake.' (Hart, 2022)
In much the same way, the project participants have used their sensory awareness and creative capacities to listen, experience and respond to the loss of the world as we know it, especially as they take on the task of providing an aesthetic and collective space for companioning what remains.
Book launch
Heidi Hart, Climate Thanatology. RSSR PRESS, 2022.
Heidi Hart's Climate Thanatology: Companioning What Remains (2022) will have a book launch on 6 October from 18 at SORTE FIRKANT, Cph.
You can purchase an advanced copy HERE and pick it up at the book release.
The Climate Thanatology project will form part of the Audacious Landscapes – The Curatorial Thing curated by Heidi Hart and Hugo Hopping for SixtyEight Art Institute from 1-8 October, 2022.
Visit www.Sixtyeight.dk or see their program for The Curatorial Thing here.
Climate Thanatology: Companioning What Remains by Heidi Hart
Really Simple Syndication Press, 2022
ISBN 978-87-972365-3-6
128 Pages. 120 DKK / 16 EUR.
This essay and review is part of an initiative to foster Danish and English language critical writings from a range of new talents across the visual arts; and as a partnership between I DO ART and SixtyEight Art Institute.
Henriette Thune Dean of Research, Faculty of Health Sciences, and member of Research Centre SHARE – Resilience in Healthcare and Network of Gender Studies, University of Stavanger, Norway. Her PhD research focused on meaning as produced through aesthetic representations. Her current focus is on qualitative methodology and interdisciplinarity among health and humanities, gender and inequalities, and communication of subjective experiences of illnesses and death.
