Photo credit: Victoria & Joe Felt
Date: Thursday, July 28, 2022, 7:00 - 8:00 pm ET
Available by: Join by Videoconference Only (learn more about videoconference)
Climate Thanatology:
A Death Cafe for the World As We Know It
Facilitated by Catharine DeLong, Heidi Hart, and Ash Sanders
Climate Thanatology is an experimental arts platform of visual art, performance, and participatory events in the US, Norway, and Denmark. This project applies the therapeutic practice of music thanatology, or music for the dying, to climate grief. Holding Grief and Gratitude for the World As We Know It invites participants to reflect on and voice their griefs about climate disruption, loss of safe spaces or innocence in the natural world, or losses relating to habitual, industrial comforts, with space to voice hope for the future, too. Live harp music, spoken poetry, and verbal and written commentary by participants accompany this event.
Climate Thanatology grows from the practice of music thanatology, or end-of-life care through musical responses to the body, where harp music responds to heart and breath rates, encouraging anxiety relief and contemplative presence in hospice environments. In extending this practice to climate grief, through visual art, poetry, and sound, this program creates a living framework using ecological rhythms as a tool. Music thanatologist Catharine DeLong’s work responding to the Great Salt Lake with her harp informs her live and recorded music companioning project events.
The project’s goal is not to remain in a state of mourning but to create a pause in habitual mindsets to allow for new imaginaries to emerge. Through visual and acoustic artworks, and participatory engagement, the program will demonstrate how therapeutic practices can be applied to artworks and how art can influence creative adaptations to a warming world.
Facilitators
Heidi Hart, curator
Heidi Hart is an Art and Humanities Fellow with SixtyEight Art Institute in Copenhagen, where she applies her research on sound in environmental arts to both curatorial and educational projects. She holds an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and a Ph.D. from Duke University (2016). She has been an invited participant in the Kelp Congress (Lofoten International Arts Festival, 2019) and The Curatorial Thing (2020), which she will co-curate in 2022. Her publications include monographs on Hanns Eisler’s art songs and on music in climate-crisis narrative.
Catharine DeLong, music-thanatologist
Rev Catharine DeLong is a certified Music-Thanatologist, hospice chaplain, and end of life educator. Based in Salt Lake City, she tends to the emotional, physical and spiritual needs of hospice patients with harp and voice. Catharine provides remote music sessions to isolated patients as a member of Harps of Comfort. She is a core faculty member of the New York Open Center’s Integrative Thanatology program, and lectures internationally on “Music as Medicine at the End of Life.” Catharine is a 2019 graduate of One Spirit Interfaith Seminary.
Ash Sanders, climate writer and activist
Ash Sanders is a climate activist, journalist and podcast producer currently based in Salt Lake and New York City while completing her MFA at NYU. She organized Occupy Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC and headed up Outreach and Education for Extinction Rebellion, NYC, pushing the City Council to pass a climate emergency resolution. Her writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Believer, Narratively, NPR's The Salt, and Buzzfeed, as well as the climate anthology, All We Can Save, and her ten-episode podcast, Unfinished: Short Creek, recently debuted on Stitcher and was chosen as the #3 podcast by The New Yorker.
If you have questions about registering for this course, please contact One Spirit Learning Alliance by email to info@1spirit.org or call 212-931-6840.