Eco Grief Clinic - Pilot (2025 - )
A collaboration with Julia Adzuki (SE/AU)
A first try-out shared at Conjuring Creativity#3, Art and the Esoteric, Hackney, London, March 16
Rooted in radical care, Eco Grief Clinic wants to activate, touch and confront the audience through performance rituals with haptic sound, somatic movement and vocal lamentation. Inviting audience to participate in divination, wearable art, organised rest and collective witnessing.
Eco Grief Clinic is grief as alchemy, cyclical cosmology, eco-feminist strategy and primordial magic. A caring and daring wake up call. The project works for healthier social ecology, performing transformative grieving rites in a time of ecosystem collapse.
Eco Grief Clinic is a performance ritual, in the form of an art clinic. A space where audience members are invited to share and be confronted with their own questions and longings relating to ecological crisis. The performers, Julia and Marianne, host the space in the role of grief doulas, meeting the audience with care, wildness, the unexpected and song. Active participants are invited to enter the clinic’s cocoons, to experience a ritual of lamentation; somatic movement, poetry, touch, vocalising, and other-worldly soundscape, a gestation phase and a rebirth, witnessed by the audience group. The audience members' own questions and longings will be addressed in personal laments, becoming universal through their specificity. Physical, emotional and psychological tensions relating to ecological grief, may be released, expressed, shared, shed light on, listened to and transformed through collective witnessing.
Eco Grief Clinic picks up the thread of what has traditionally been women's work; lamenting at life's transitions and times of loss and change. Our intention is to reweave old mourning rituals into transformative and secular liturgies for our times of ecological crisis. With roots in Karelian lament and Celtic keening, this project works with the alchemy of grief through a philosophy of radical care. A sonic and haptic cosmology of creatures, elements and places together with the human voice, a balm for the collective soul, and body, that is deeply needed now.
Ecological grief, though experienced by many as climate anxiety and existential threat, is barely spoken about in our grief-fearing culture. Eco Grief Clinic offers another type of medicine by softly bridging this gap through play with divination cards and by singing the unspeakable. This unfolding performance ritual will open the creative potential of the grieving process by making space for listening deeply, to ourselves, each other and to the more-than-human. Giving shape to loss in an alchemical manner involves opening the flow between grief and gratitude. We guide the audience down the rabbit hole, through the cocoon to the other side, bringing them into contact with the existential pith of life. Eco Grief Clinic is a caring and daring wake up call. A call back to ecological understanding. Of sensing oneself as part of the whole. The performance ritual is a cry from our grandmothers grandmothers and a calling to the primordial mother in all of us.
In March 2025, Julia and Marianne traveled to London to share and test some first ideas with an audience as part of Conjuring Creativity #3 conference. This practice sharing has given a lot of vital information about how we wish to work together and what threads are interesting to follow. In hosting Eco Grief Clinic Julia and Marianne bring together more than 50 years of experience in the fields of choreography, dance, somatic movement, sound art, visual art and ritual performance in relation with ecology.
Participant testimonials from Eco Grief Clinic at Conjuring Creativity#3 in London, March 16th 2025:
“The loss of nature and biodiversity is something I have thought about a lot in the last few years, and recently also experienced first hand. For me, this leads to a lot of feelings that are mostly processed alone and at moments where particular triggers (news stories, pictures etc) lead to feelings around this emerging "out of the blue", so to speak - feelings such as sorrow, helplessness and anger. Being given the space and time for processing this eco-grief felt extremely valuable, as did the feeling of doing so collectively. Given so many of us are having these feelings at the moment, it really made me feel that inserting these type of rituals into our society is such a valuable thing to do - the Eco Grief Clinic should be a public service!
The reading I received from the cards aligned a lot with my particular experience, and I took the sentences I received with me as guiding prompts for future resilience. The feeling of being in the cocoon was one of being held and "heard" and experiencing the voice and touch was a very healing process. I only wish it could have gone on for longer. Thanks so much to Marianne & Julia for taking on some of our collective grief for that moment and giving me a space to feel into those feelings in a safe environment.” - Una Hamilton Helle
“Thank you for such a powerful space holding, I felt like I was being guided through a journey of feeling, assisted by your lament. The card reading at the beginning felt particularly resonant and then when I climbed inside the cocoon it was like I’m your song processed on my behalf the emotions I had stuck in my body. Thank you for your service, it is sacred work.” - Luke Fazakerley
