Wakes

What happens during the ecological workshops, including communal grieving, performance and capturing the DNA of the people and place.appens during the ecological workshops, including communal grieving, performance and capturing the DNA of the people and place.

The workshop involves movement and nature connection inviting attendees to connect with the natural world around them and their bodies as a way to come into relationship with their grief. And at the same time celebrate the love of the life of what’s been lost, as in an indigenous Celtic wake. Grieving is a generative practice that not only highlights the depth of our love for the earth and natural world. But also generates resilience and positive action in the face of it.

It’s now dawning on wide parts of the population that our earth is changing. But most people still find it hard to engage effectively with what’s happening. Many feel helpless, because they cannot see how individual behaviour change alone can alleviate the problem, while policy changes seem hard to achieve. And so people worry in silence, but we really need to come together to reflect together to change our ways.

If COP cannot go ahead because of the COVID pandemic, we’ll take the workshops online and deliver them digitally.

Find a wake near you in the calendar.

Hilly sand dunes on the coast with grass, and the sea in the distance in a bay, wihth a red and white lighthouse on the other side of the bay

Pain for the world—the outrage and sorrow—breaks us open to a larger sense of who we are. It is a doorway to the realisation of our mutual belonging in the web of life …. when we open our eyes to what is happening, even when it breaks our hearts, we discover our true size; for our heart, when it breaks open, can hold the whole universe.”

Joanna Macy

DNA artforms

During the wake, we’ll invite personal contributions to a nature altar and capture the DNA of the collective people and place. We’ll focus on locality, and how a community can understand and engage with the particular way that their immediate environment will change. Grief tenders will collect samples from the environment around them, be that a park, their garden, a riverbank, dust from the building they work in, or even some dirt from a street corner. The DNA will be extracted from these samples and analysed to reveal the visible and invisible life that has passed through the sampled environment. 

The nature altar and it’s DNA archive will be turned into an artistic sculpture or form co-designed with local artists and the community, left in the locality. As a memorial to the love for the earth that propels many working towards a regenerative future, and those who chose to bear witness to this moment in time.

Fish swimming around coral underwater, with sun beams illuminating parts of the coral and some of the fish, as if they're sparkling