In “‘What Remains’: Un/Learning How to Grieve, Re/Imagining How to Care,” Marietta Radomska reminds us that learning always entails some un-learning, and imagining involves some re-imagining. Focusing on the ongoing ecocide unleashed through Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, unfolding since February 2022, Radomska asks about possibilities not only to learn how to grieve, but also how to mobilise an ethical response and concern. Radomska shows ways in which ecological grief, socio-cultural and artistic imaginaries of crisis, and environmental ethics become interwoven in art, artivist, and community projects engaging with environmental violence and death. She suggests that affective engagements with art assist us in experiencing and comprehending the more-than-human loss and eco-grief, and by doing so, oblige us not only to witness, but also to care.

To paraphrase philosopher Jacques Rancière, aesthetics is not about art and beauty as such, but – most importantly – about the entire ‘regime of experience’, which has the power to disrupt the status quo and transform reality (Rancière and Engelmann 2019). It is from those sensual experiences that political relations and imaginaries develop. Part IV of the Handbook comprises chapters that explore sensual, sensorial, and affective engagements with death, dying, and mourning, articulated through the visual, sonic, textual, and digital arts and media. These engagements open up spaces for alternative and novel forms of ethical relations and political imagination.

The contributors analyse cases from across different art and media formats, focusing on cultural and social practices that disrupt the binary frames of hetero- and cis-normative, anthropo- and andro-centric regimes governing the dominant and conventional depictions and understandings of death, dying, and mourning. In the process, death itself and its accompanying imaginaries, subjects and objects, mediums and ways of sensing undergo defamiliarisation, and become ‘strange’ and queered.

In the contemporary context of environmental crises and the degradation of resources, certain habitats become unliveable, leading to the death of individuals and species extinction. Whilst bioscience emphasises interdependency and relationality as crucial characteristics of life shared by all organisms, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between humans and nonhumans, particularly evident in the context of death. On the one hand, death appears as a process common to all forms of life; on the other, as an event that distinguishes human from other organisms. Against this background, this article explores how contemporary art—in particular, the series of works The Absence of Alice (2008–2011) by Australian new-media and bioartist Svenja Kratz—challenges the normative and human-exceptionalist concept of death. By employing queerfeminist biophilosophy as a strategy that focuses on relations, processes and transformations instead of ‘essences’, the article examines the ways Kratz’s works deterritorialise the conventional concept of death. In this way, it hopes to attend to the intimacies between materialities of a human and nonhuman kind that form part of the processes of death and dying, and what follows, to reframe ethico-ontology of death as material and processual ecologies of the non/living.

Direct military actions and their indirect effects carry profound consequences for nature, resulting in destruction, environmental violence, and ecocide. The imperial war inflicted by Russia on eastern Ukraine since 2014, and further extended as a full-scale invasion of the country, unfolding since 24 February 2022, is a prime example. In spring 2024, over two years after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian artist and designer Polina Choni and Polish-Swedish environmental humanities researcher Marietta Radomska, engaged in a conversation focused on Polina’s artistic practice and select art projects. Polina’s work, both embedded in and simultaneously resisting the conditions of the present, forms a poetic yet powerful response to violence and destruction. What comes through, seemingly unnoticed, in-between the lines of Polina’s art and this conversation is the historical context of Central and Eastern Europe, with the mark of wars and genocides, unleashed on the region by Nazism and Stalinism, and the related trauma that spills over through generations. Choni’s artworks are never only about the here and now. And yet, the conversation focuses on what it means to engage in creative and artistic practices in times of war-induced environmental harm, ecocide, and uncertainty.

The Tissue Culture & Art (TC&A) Project is an artistic collaboration, established by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr in 1996 in Perth, AU. TC&A focuses on the exploration of tissue engineering as a form of artistic expression and a powerful tool reshaping contemporary social and cultural imaginaries (https://tcaproject.net/). Catts and Zurr are pioneers of bioart, a form of hybrid art/science practices involving the use of biomatter (tissues, cells, organisms) as an artistic medium, along with scientific methods, protocols, and tools. TC&A has always critically and creatively zoomed in on the ‘semi-living’, i.e. life forms such as cells, tissues or fragments of organisms isolated from their original source and sustained in the laboratory conditions. The semi-living encompasses spaces where the processes of living and dying are entangled on multiple levels and scales, where temporalities are not always linear, and where biomatter is being moulded and extracted in the context of advanced bio/techno-capitalism. TC&A’s artistic, critical, and scholarly work has served as a vital inspiration for developments not only in bioart or art/science, but also in design, architecture, or industry. This interview traces the critical-creative explorations of life/death ecologies and the accompanying ethico-politics forming the ground for Catts and Zurr’s iconic works

"… if no stories are told, if all the violence goes unremarked, then we are thrust into the world of the doubly violated. Silence, however comfortable it seems at times, is a failure to acknowledge the gravity of violence."

Deborah Bird Rose 2012

We mourn humans, we mourn nature, we mourn the past. While the notion of bereavement linked to the death of a human or to the loss of that which has already passed is societally accepted or even expected from an individual, the mourning of nonhuman death and ecological loss has a rather different status. It is frequently described as ‘disenfranchised grief’: not openly accepted or acknowledged in society.

Simultaneously, in the present anthropocenic context, where climate change and planetary environmental destruction render certain habitats unliveable and induce socio-economic inequalities and shared ‘more-than-human’ vulnerabilities, death and loss become urgent environmental concerns. The killing of nonhuman populations, annihilation of ecosystems and species extinction mobilise discussions among scientists, politicians, legal experts, environmental activists, and general society, and also, increasingly pervade cultural imaginaries, narratives, and contemporary art. Works by visual artists such as Terike Haapoja, Brandon Ballengée, IC-98, Gwen Curry, Polina Choni, or Svenja Kratz open up spaces of narrating and rehearsing ecological grief and mourning. 

Theoretically grounded in queer death studies and environmental humanities, this paper explores present grief imaginaries and engagements with environmental violence, ecocide, more-than-human death, dying, and extinction, as they are interwoven through contemporary bio-, eco- and new-media artworks. It is there where an ecological ontology of death is being exposed and ethical territories of eco-grief unfold. While examining affective landscapes of select art projects, the paper argues for art’s unique potential for re-attuning our sensorial and cognitive coordinates to the demands of the more-than-human crises and transition times we have found ourselves in.

This performance lecture combines fragments of poems, video and sound-art material, and theoretical investigation into visual arts’ engagements with the questions of more-than-human death and ecological grief. Theoretically grounded in queer death studies (Radomska et al. 2020) and queerfeminist biophilosophy (Radomska 2020), this lecture performance traces how contemporary eco-, bio, and new-media artworks respond to planetary scales of Anthropocene necropolitics (Lykke 2019), entwined with slow and spectacular environmental violence and more-than-human polycrisis. In doing so, these artworks deterritorialise (Deleuze and Guattari 2004) the human-exceptionalist conceptualisations, imaginaries, understandings, and approaches to death, dying, and mourning. They seek to attend to the intimacies between materialities of a human and a nonhuman kind that form part of the processes of death and dying, and what follows, to reframe the ethico-ontology of death as material and processual ecologies of the non/living (Radomska 2016). Visual and material storytelling – fleshed out through the works of IC98, Terike Haapoja, Brandon Ballangée, Polina Choni, and Svenja Kratz, among others – explore the questions of relating, remembrance, ethics, and peculiar forms of resistance. Ultimately, they all offer – in very different ways – an assortment of conceptual and affective strategies which simultaneously queer and expand our own relationship to death and grief. In this way, they push us towards a different image of thought (Deleuze 2004), urgently needed in the here and now. 

Chapter 1 accounts for the co-editors’ entry points to the curating of the Handbook. Following a brief description of the back-story, the history of the Network of Queer Death Studies, they situate their curating efforts in relation to the wider context of contemporary studies of death, dying, mourning, and afterlife, and present the methodological, theoretical, and ethico-political reflections that have guided the book’s coming into being. It is highlighted how queering, posthumanising, and decolonising approaches to both human and more-than-human death-worlds, and a bio- and geo-egalitarian queerfeminist ethos have guided the curating. Theoretical frameworks for analysing the multiple effects of current Anthropocene necropolitics, the proliferation of death-worlds and experiences of social and ecological unsettlement and defuturing that in both a human and nonhuman sense characterise the current times, are also discussed. Moreover, the chapter emphasises how the curating has been based on critical approaches, but also, on an affirmative ethics, explorations of alternative life/death ontologies and resistant commitments to mourning and remembrance, from the perspective of the marginalised in terms of gender, race, class, geopolitical positioning, sexuality, embodiment, embrainment, species, and other markers of hierarchised difference. Different kinds of grieving, lamentation, and politics of remembrance are foregrounded, including eco-grief.

Denna text är en svensk översättning av den första, mer övergripande delen av introduktionen till ett specialnummer av tidskriften Australian Feminist Studies om queera dödsstudier år 2020:

Radomska, M., T. Mehrabi, and N. Lykke. 2020. Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying and Mourning From a Queerfeminist Perspective. Australian Feminist Studies 35(104), pp. 81-100 https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1811952.

Originalabstrakt (på engelska):

This introduction to the Queer Death Studies special issue explores an emerging transdisciplinary field of research. This field critically, (self-)reflexively and affirmatively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by current planetary scale necropolitics and its framing of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world. It is set against the background of traditional engagements with the question of death, often grounded in Western hegemonic and normative ideas of dying, dead and mourning subjects and bodies, on the one hand; and on the other contemporary discourses on human and nonhuman death and extinction, directly linked to the environmental crisis, capitalist and post/colonial extractivist necropolitics, material and symbolic violence, oppression and inequalities, and socio-economic, political and ecological unsustainabilities. By bringing together conceptual and analytical tools grounded in feminist materialisms and feminist theorising broadly speaking, queer theory and decolonial critique, the contributions in this special issue strive to advance queerfeminist methodologies and ontological, ethical and political understandings that critically and creatively attend to the problem of death, dying and mourning in the current environmental, cultural, and socio-political contexts.

This part of the book zooms in on the ontological contours of the concept of death and its relation to life. While the question of death has been present in Western philosophy since antiquity, its ontological and axiological explorations have primarily been concerned with the death of human individuals, contributing thus to a form of ‘exceptionalisation’ of human death. Culturally, death became the final point/ destination of one’s life, or a form of passage to an afterlife, which could take various shapes, depending on one’s cultural and/ or religious background. Consequently, a clear separation between the ‘living’ and the ‘dead’ has been formed.

In contrast to such a clear- cut binary of ‘life’ and ‘death’, the chapters included in this section map out and explore – in very different ways – processualities and technologies of life and death as always-already entangled and complex ecologies, marked by their own particular temporalities, ethics, and politics.