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, anthropocene, artistic reasearch, ecology, Environment, poetry, scores, invitations, ethics
en

s†ëf/\n sch/\efer (stefan schäfer, he/ him) is an Amsterdam-based artistic researcher investigating perspectives on death and commemorative ritual in relation to environmental devastation. His work has been internationally exhibited, shared, discussed and are always in close collaborations with more-than-humans, people and institutions from various fields like anthropology, poetry, music, filmmaking, hacking, dance, theatre, green funeral activism. At this moment he is doing his artistic doctorate at the ATD lectorate of the Academy of theater and Dance in Amsterdam.
Conducted through transdisciplinary practice research operating across art, design and performance, sch/\efer’s methodogical approaches in his current research include: fieldworks to the ‘dying’ Hochvogel mountain (AUT/DE) and the remains of the ‘dead’ glacier Ok in Iceland; on-site conversations with people visiting the mountain and glacier; interviews with the initiators of the first glacier funeral held in Iceland in 2019; desk research including literature review about the “ontological turn”, working hands-on with features of Ontologically-Oriented-Design, the pluriverse, climate justice, landslide research, mountain ritual and – performance; practice research through an iterative cycle of experiments and workshares related to field work and readings in the form of miniatures, making wearables, prompts, visualisations, participatory installations, experimental writing, (relational) landscape translation and hand-poke self-tattooing. 

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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  • /\/\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?
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