Ecological Grief as Climate Interrogation and Planetary Pedagogy of Love
Foreshadowing is the transnational ecological grief council. It was born out of the necessity to collectively witness the environmental loss by the extractive operations of neo/colonial capitalism. It aims to build a planetary pedagogy of love by addressing those who are no longer with us or won’t be soon, exploring site-specific, community-oriented, multi-species healing methods.
Founded in 2023, Foreshadowing has gathered the force of artists, curators, writers, and researchers across continents whose lifelong dedication is a creative conviction of interrogating, archiving, and organising around ecological loss and interspecies trauma.
Foreshadowing is an evolving web: a porous, tender place where all beings gather in vulnerability and solidarity. We hold space for difficult questions that refuse the impulse to fix, rescue, or progress. As the indigenous botanical scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer says, we ‘could not bear the loneliness of being dry in a wet world’. Finding interspecies solace and love in the space of grief, we listen, listen deep for accountable relationality.
More info on what we do
Seasonal Gatherings for Wet World
Foreshadowing convenes seasonally. Yet we begin by asking: what does a season mean in a time when the familiar rhythms and cycles of climate have been constantly disconcerted — dissolving into irregular pulses, into atmospheres without measure?
Our seasonal programme offers rituals for a post-seasonal world, lingering in disorientation, privileging attentiveness over comprehension, tenderness over mastery. These are not the old seasons of harvest or frost, but emergent ones. Through these shifting intervals, the council asks how we might continue to sense, to stay, to love, when the world’s old rhythms can no longer be read.
Our yearly cycle consists of three online conversations and one in-person convivial gathering, all open to those willing to witness to ecological grief and search for transformative healing.
Composting in Grief
Learning as Witnessing
As we practice ecological grief, not only as collective emotional resonance in times of climate crisis but also as critical interrogation process of witnessing slow violence and injustice by the profit-driven systems, so much un/learning has emerged.
The Foreshadowing members, who are involved in long-term witnessing around various sites and ecosystems damaged by neo-colonial hyper-capitalist extraction, compost their stories through publications – sharing the voices of Malaysian Rainforest communities whose homes and traditions are continuously threatened, interspecies migration and diaspora trajectories that complicates the binary notion of native-invasive and the conflict narratives of human and more-than-humans, and the insight to build the eco-grief infrastructure for transnational solidarity and transformative climate pedagogy.
Website designed and built by Ghost Chan
foreshadowing.ecogrief@gmail.com