Queer Death Society zine
This mixed media creation is made up of creative and academic contributions from people around the world on the subjects of death, dying and mourning. Please visit the link below where you can view the zine and/or download a pdf. You can view or download...
Mourning our pets
Our friend Yuli Somme from Bellacouche has sent this beautiful piece I remember years ago my daughter cradling her dead hamster, trying to comprehend the why and what of it all. Five years after the death of my lovely Labracollie, Flo, I still miss the soft...
Goodness and acceptance
Thanks to Caspar Henderson @casparhenderson for sharing these words from Iris Murdoch: “Goodness is connected with the acceptance of real death and real chance and real transience and only against the background of this acceptance, which is so psychologically...
Ear plugs…
There was once a tradition in Hookland of sextons and gravediggers wearing special ear plugs to prevent the dead whispering to them as they worked the churchyard. Few gravediggers today admit to keeping the practice, though those of Walmington are an exception....
Sophie Pierce in The Observer
Sophie Pierce is in conversation with art.earth’s Richard Povall on Friday April 9. She will be talking about her son Felix and the memoir she is publishing. Sophie talks about all this in this week’s Observer: It’s 9 March 2017. I am sitting in an ambulance, holding...
Borrowed Time is an online conference with a difference: it feels like a live gathering and brings together a wide array of voices exploring ideas of loss and dying from personal and planetary perspectives.
These themes are explored across the event which runs from October 31 to November 3. We proudly offer a screening of Jennifer Abbott’s The Magnitude of All Things, her feature-length documentary film which is not yet on general release. Jennifer will also be in conversation with Mat Osmond. Other keynote presentations come from the renowned thinker Bayo Akomolafe who asks us In what sense might we consider death – more than just a terminal point – a gift to this pandemic-inflected Anthropocene. And choreographer Paul Michael Henry whose searingly powerful work explores the ecological crisis from many human angles.
When Jennifer Abbott lost her sister to cancer, her sorrow opened her up to the profound gravity of climate breakdown. Abbott’s new documentary The Magnitude of All Things draws intimate parallels between the experiences of grief—both personal and planetary. Stories from the frontlines of climate change merge with recollections from the filmmaker’s childhood on Ontario’s Georgian Bay. What do these stories have in common? The answer, surprisingly, is everything.
For the people featured, climate change is not happening in the distant future: it is kicking down the front door. Battles waged, lamentations of loss, and raw testimony coalesce into an extraordinary tapestry, woven together with raw emotion and staggering beauty that transform darkness into light, grief into action.
Borrowed Time runs from October 31 to Nov 3 online. Book now at borrowed-time.info
We’re all of us living on borrowed time: the brevity of our personal span of existence now mirrored by a biosphere under intolerable pressure, its every life system beginning to fray and unravel under civilisation’s weight. We witness its collapse every day now, in new stories of cataclysmic weather events, of lives lost, of flora and fauna weirded, disrupted, gone. However incipiently or unconsciously, we live at a time of collective grieving - no life exempt from the consequences of this relentless devastation and what it has set loose.
Borrowed Time, on death dying & change is nevertheless a celebration: a gathering of disparate voices from across the globe coming together online from October 31 to November 3. These voices use many registers and tones to delve into the depths of living with and dealing with death and dying with joy as well as with sadness. Borrowed Time is a space to explore questions pertaining to death, dying and change, and to ask what dying has to teach us about living well, and living sustainably.
Above all Borrowed Time is a celebration of life, one that sets out to embrace and welcome all of its messy joys and travails.
October 31 to Nov 3 online. Book now at borrowed-time.info
Borrowed Time: on death, dying & change
borrowed-time.info
The deadline for proposals to Borrowed Time is Sunday December 13 at 23.00hrs.