D.E.A.D.line
(2025)
author(s): s†ëf∆/\/ sch/\efer
published in: Research Catalogue
Experimental article for the Performance Philosophy journal Vol. 9 No. 2 (2024): With the Dead: Performance Philosophy, Dying, and Grief.
Abstract:
The last years the so-called phenomenon “glacier funerals” has appeared and spread globally with the most famous one happening in Iceland (Ok-glacier) in August 2019, followed by amongst others, funerals in Switzerland (Piezol glacier), Mexico (Ayoloco glacier) the United States (Clark glacier). It is one way to cope with ecological grief, an emotional response to the (future) impact of so-called anthropogenic climate change. The funerals differ in execution, but they remain rituals usually performed for humans and are “projected” on glacial beings. This works powerfully for creating awareness of glacier loss and climate change as such. The declared deaths of the glaciers are defined as the loss of the status as a glacier by scientists and are measurable. In this article, I am in for a search for a way to emerge rituals with mountains and glaciers as collaborators, based on a rather personal, partly autobiographic, artistic, and poetic approach, which leads to a better understanding of caring for a mountain and a glacier and bridges the gap between abstract measurable knowledge and a public in a way that it makes the impact of anthropogenic climate collapse sensible.
/\/\o\/ing \/\/i†h /\/\ount/\ins. Scores and invitations, set 1.
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): stefan schäfer
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This is a first set of scores and invitations for performers to train with, mountaineers and hikers to use during a mountain visit, students and teachers to start a wide range of discussions about ethical approaches when working with more-than-humans, climate change, commemorative rituals in relation to mountain or landscapes in a broader sense. They can be used in practice and at the same time operate as discussion starters. The scores have been developed in collaboration with the hoch\/ogel /\/\oun†/\in (AU/DE), starting from field work consisting of daily visits to the /\/\oun†/\in in July 2024. Afterwards I shared finding of the excursion with the Embodied Knowledge Research Group of the Lectorate of Theater and Dance at the Amsterdam University of the Arts and formulated this first set of scores and invitations. The set includes characteristics, environments and movements of /\/\oun†/\ins and rockslides in order to perform those at any location. For geological characteristics and movements I reached out to the Technical University of Munich Landslide Research Department who observes, and researches the hoch\/ogel /\/\oun†/\in and its movement and transformation. They provided me with articles and invited me to a course and an excursion. Altogether forms the base for the scores. The scores and invitations are a continuing part of my research with which I contribute to "Landscape Translation" (Pitches, 2020) within the field of performance as well as to artistic research methodology, design methodology and mountaineering. Landscape Translation is the conceptual meeting point between two perspectives of training regimes depending on /\/\oun†/\ins, "either conceptually (as places for training to occur), or formally (as inspiring shapes, figures and metaphors) (Ibid). My contribution focuses on acknowledging the temporality and constant transition of a /\/\oun†/\in and an intimate, reciprocal relationship with the /\/\oun†ain. This set is one of many shapes of how to share these kind of experiences, emotions, relations with other audiences. To outline an ethical and just position the scores and invitations incorporate amongst others the following features of ontologically-oriented-design (Escobar, 2018). They can be seen as hands-on invitations to act in either a /\/\oun†/\in site or any other space. With the development of the research, new features will be added and some of the existing ones might be be adjusted. Ontologically-oriented-design: - promotes convivial and communal instrumentations involving human/nonhumans collectives provoked into existence by ecological breakdowns or shared harm. It imagines designs that take seriously the active powers issuing from nonhumans, and it builds on the positive ontology of vibrant matter, realizing that design situations always involve encounters between human and nonhuman actants of all kinds. - always entails reconnection: with nonhumans, things in their thinghood (adding persons in their personhood), with the earth, with spirit, humans in their radical alterity (decolonially, considering the inclusion of multiple worlds, rather that exclusion). It contributes to dismantling dualisms and take seriously all forms of nondualist existence. Enables ontologies of compassion and care. - explicitly contributes to creating the languages that create the world(s) in which people operate in the creation of domains of conversations for actions, it necessarily moves from design to experience and back - is not a(bout) straightforward fabrication but modes of revealing; it considers retrieving forms of making that are not merely technological (going beyond techno-rationalism), while embracing new creations. It may do so by looking at the entire range of design traditions (within the West and beyond) non-eurocentrically and decolonially. References: Escobar, A., "Designs for the Pluriverse. Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds", Duke University Press, 2018. Pitches, J., "Performing Mountains", Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. (2025-07-14)
/\/\o\/ing \/\/i†h /\/\ount/\ins. de\/eloping co/\/\/\/\e/\/\ora†i\/e ri†uals in coll/\bor/\†ion \/\/i†h †he "dying" hoch\/ogel /\/\oun†ain
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): stefan schäfer
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This paper has been presented at the SIEF ethnography and folklore studies conference 2025 in Aberdeen. For the panel "Unwriting mountain worlds: beyond stereotypes and anthropocentrism". I decided to pre-record reading my paper and present it with a 22. minute video edit of my fieldwork in the summer 2024.
Within the context of the global climate crisis, mourning rituals concerning ecological loss, or future ecological loss of a landscape have gained attention in the last couple of years. In 2019, Iceland held the first glacier funeral for the dead glacier Ok. Almost at the same time, people in Switzerland went on a funeral march to the Pizol glacier. Since then, glacier funerals have been spread globally with the intention of raising awareness for the global climate crisis. Death and commemorative rituals are in this context a powerful manner to do so. A part of the rituals remains pre-dominantly Western and are for a big part copy-pasted around the globe. For example, the text from the plaque in Iceland got translated into Spanish and placed on the remains of the Ayoloco glacier in Mexico. The performed rituals are usually held for other humans and projected on a landscape. Although I understand the benefits, I find both aspects also problematic. First, the predominantly Western-eurocentric rituals, like wearing black, imply a colonialist dispersion of commemorative ritual across the globe. A “one funeral fits all” approach is rooted in a capitalist funeral industry. I claim for rituals emerging in and with a mountain. Characteristics of, and relations with the mountain are essential in this process. Second, the sheer projection of rituals for humans on a mountain keeps up the widespread Western idea that the human stands above nature. I know these points are not the intentions of glacier funeral initiators’, and I am grateful for and inspired by what they do. But my motivation for this paper derives from the mentioned concerns and lead to the following questions:
Regarding a potential “one funeral fits all” tendency which is based on predominantly Western-Eurocentric rituals following a universalist “One-world-world” view, how could and why should rituals for mountains and glaciers operate as counter-perspectives on this tendency?
Considering (future) ecological loss, how can features of ontological design provide methods to emerge commemorative rituals in, with and from a dying landscape, in this case the “dying” Hochvogel mountain?