Wesen: Practices for Interspecies Mourning (2025)

Wesen (German): (a) being; essence, central character, nature of.

WESEN: Practices for Interspecies Mourning is the first solo exhibition of the collective Sympoietic Society and functions as a reflection on the group's long-term artistic research into ecological grief and more-than-human kinship. Evoking both nature and the spectral presences, the word wesen guides us into an exceptional shared space of mourning: not as an endpoint, but as a generative site of collective imagination and ecological attunement.

The exhibition originates from the project ICE * In Case of Emergency (2023), which explored the disappearance of European glaciers and associated folklore. In it, Sympoietic Society travelled to Sideby (FI) to research glacial land uplifting processes, Val Camonica (IT) to connect with ancestral stories by the Adamello glacier, and finally to the Austrian Alps to commemorate the late Rote Wand glacier. The project concluded with a farewell ceremony not for a dead landscape, but for one melting into transformation. Since then, the collective has grieved for these fellow bodies of water and cultivated practices of collective mourning in the form of site-sensitive workshops, performances, storytelling sessions, and walking practices.

This exhibition focuses on the tools and traces of these practices. Glacier shrouds, ghostly costumes, ceramic vessels, embroidered tapestries, and children's drawings function as a material link between the lost and the nearby. Ready to be embraced once again, these objects will be activated through a series of events, performances, and workshops throughout the exhibition. Through these tools and traces, we ask: How do we embrace grief in the face of extinction and climate crisis as an ethical and relational act? How can mourning be interspecies, intergenerational, and situated, an active process of sensing the world otherwise?

Text and images from Kevin Bellò / Sympoietic Society.