Stefan Schäfer

Netherlands (residence), Germany (citizenship)
research interests: ecological grief, ecological loss, Climate Change, ontological design, Design research, artistic research, Death, death culture, commemorative ritual, ritual, end of life practices, mountains, rocks, Glacier, glacier funeral, Embodied knowledge
en

i am s†ëfΔ/\/ sch/\efer is a practice-based researcher deriving from a design background. i investigate death and commemorative ritual in relation to environmental devastation. all projects result in various media and are declared d.e.a.d. (death. environment. anthropocene. design), a varying acronym. they have been internationally exhibited and are close collaborations with people and institutions of different fields: for instance anthropology, poetry, music, hacking, dance, theatre, music-theatre artists, end-of-life care, funeral industry, green funeral activism. 

at this point i am a professional doctorate (pd) candidate at das research, lectorate of the academy of theatre and aance, amsterdam university of the arts (ahk) with my research "breaking apart together. performing ontological design with dying mountains and dead glaciers."

research

research expositions

  • 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.
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