A work-share of field research findings and documentations of spending a month with the breaking Hochvogel /\/\ountain (AUT/DEU) and the remains of Ok glacier (ISL) in an installation form for a participative audience; In this case, the Embodied Knowledge Research Group (EKRG) of the Lectorate of the Academy of Theatre and Dance, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca and Emilie Gallier. Several non-human entities have been spread throughout an indoor studio space. Clothing, hiking equipment, a hand-poke tattoo set, sleeping bag, textiles, pencils form a group of entities that have been with me on the mountain - and glacier visits. A second group forms the audiovisual documentation (moving image, sound) of experiences and activities of hiking, climbing, slipping, tattooing, drawing. A third group consisted of books and articles in relation to ecological grief, extinction, mountaineering, time, death, absence-presence, continuing bonds, design, mountain performance and eco poetry. A fourth group consisted of rocks collected in the IJmeer in February 2024, forming miniature mountains.
The participants received a short introduction on the field research and that every part of the installation is an invitation or a score for making some work in the broadest sense, movement, reading out loud, talk, discuss, draw, write, frottage technique, wearing the clothes, wrapping the textures, moving (with) each element, observing, listening, touching, smelling, tasting. It has been a first step towards sharing "affective data" through embodied practices that possibly could, but don't have to, result in visuals or sound.
The session's duration was around two hours of everybody exploring and working with the installation and all elements, of which the final thirty minutes merged into a rather presentation form, or a verbal discussion in which specific occurring questions regarding experiences of the field research have been answered. This lead to a feedback round on the EKRG members' experiences, findings, comments. The experience has been described as emotional in both, a sad and joyful way, beautiful, based on the elements being present in the installation, while my body has been absent, or absent-present. "The absent body was here", as participant Maria Ines Villasmil had put it in her "result" (see photo in the attachments). My absence has been described as sad, something that has passed, while another participant found this the beauty of it, the present elements are seen in the documentation clips and are worn by me. The next steps will be on investigating how to play with the idea of an absence-presence and relate this to ecological loss and grief as wel as to environmental exhaustion and the climate crisis from human and more-than human perspectives. How to bring the this affective and intense experiences in building an intimate relation with the mountain to different audiences as a "miniature allegory" of (the realization of) the anthropogenic* climate crisis in order to build closer relationships with the environment on the long term.
