研究者：呂岱如
本文為「藝術如何成為⽣態的盟友？英國與印度草根實例訪查與永續研究」之部分成果內容，由國家文化藝術基金會支持贊助。
Researcher: Esther Lu
This article is a part of the research outcome of the project “How Does Art Become an Ally of Ecology? Field Research and Sustainability Report from the UK and India,” supported by the National Culture and Arts Foundation.
Published date: 14 August, 2026
Please scroll down to read the English version.
# 0
「『在鄉之愁』（solastalgia）意指，當人們意識到自己所棲居、所熱愛的地方正遭受迫近的侵害時所感受到的痛苦。」 ——格倫・阿爾布雷希特（Glenn Albrecht）[1]《大地情感》（Earth Emotions），2019。
2025 年夏天，我在河口藝術節（Estuary Festival）上結識了藝術家崔榮淑（최영숙，Youngsook Choi）。面朝開闊的泰晤士河口，參與者通過無線耳機一面聆聽一段由海蛤與大海講述的故事，一面在地景中移動，如同一群臨時聚集的候鳥。在崔榮淑與 Taey Iohe 合作的作品《潛水意識，或任你想》（Submarine Consciousness， Or What Have You）中，在地生態史通過聲音、運動與專注力徐徐展開。行進途中，我在旁白、灼熱的氣流、移動的地景與遠處巡弋的戰鬥機之間遊移，難以將注意力集中於單一層面。然而，這種注意力的分散流動卻逐漸將我的身體與環境相互調頻。我的身體逐漸感到鬆弛柔軟而帶著鹹澀——彷彿有一小部分的自己已經溶入了這片河口。在那段集體共處時光中，我感受到了格倫．阿爾布雷希特所說的「在鄉之愁」：它不僅是一種喪失，更是一種與超越人類世界共同感受到的境況。
自2020年起，崔榮淑便開始將生態哀悼（ecological grief）確立為其創作實踐的核心軸線。[2] 這一取向根植於一種深刻的體認：社會政治體制未能跟上地球系統所發生的劇變，而這種「預期性哀悼」（anticipatory grief）儼然成為我們所有人此後將長久共存的境況。她通過哀悼、具身性與關係性重新構建生態知識，抵抗那種以數據為導向、以人類為中心的氣候危機應對方式。當人類中心主義體系持續破壞生態平衡之際，主流話語對「碳素養」（carbon literacy）的強調——即以可量化的指標與個體責任為衡量標準——卻進一步使人們對生態損失的現實失去真實的生命體驗。它以抽象的手段製造出一種可被掌控的假象，同時遮蔽了人類與超越人類世界之間彼此糾纏的苦難。
通過在英國與東南亞展開的田野調查——包括那些遭受生態破壞與被迫遷移之地——崔榮淑追溯生態哀悼如何從資本主義榨取主義與新殖民暴力相互交織的系統而生。她的作品並不將哀悼視為被動的反應，而是將其動員為一種繪製這些結構的政治性與感官方法。因此，她的實踐與生態女性主義（ecofeminism）的取徑產生共鳴，尤其體現在對具身知識、關係性關懷與集體療癒過程的強調之上。本文探討她所提出的「生態素養」（ecological literacy）概念如何通過參與式儀式與跨物種相遇而展開，從而生成根植於情動（affect）、具身性與關係性的全新知識形式。
在崔榮淑的藝術實踐中，存在著一段漫長的研究歷程與旅途。然而，真正塑造她實踐方向的轉折點，卻源自一場現實悲劇——2019年的「埃塞克斯39人事件」（39名越南移民在一輛冷藏貨櫃車內被發現身亡）讓她開始閱讀那些嵌於跨國權力結構之中的不公與不平等，而這些結構與新自由主義、新殖民主義實踐以及隱匿的氣候不公等又是如何相互交媾。疫情期間，她創作了紀念性表演活動《非此未來》（Not This Future），來作為回應這一事件的儀式。人們回應她的線上邀請，通過錄像分享他們各自自行設計的紀念儀式，而這段經歷促使她進一步探究集體哀悼與療癒的力量。
後來，當崔榮淑在2020年參與聖海倫斯（St. Helens）的場域特定計畫時，她面對的是一片徹底拒絕再生的礦場廢棄地。在她看來，這片土地彷彿深陷哀慟之中，以至於無法、抑或不願，再生長出任何東西。這一震撼的體悟，連同這片荒蕪的地景，在她心中埋下深刻印記，她關於生態哀悼的構想也由此啟程——去揭露這片場域背後的歷史與系統性暴力，同時進一步思考隨之而來的慰藉與轉化性療癒的可能。
又在另一段前往馬來西亞的調研中，她接觸到「sewang」——當地原住民社群的傳統療癒儀式。夢境是集體或社群療癒的門戶：參與者以做夢作為繪製生態地標的方式，並藉此重新定位自身的關係，在超越個人感知與語言的層面接收意識。這種實踐與哲學為崔榮淑帶來新的啟發，促使她反思：我們的生態素養常常受限於語言能力與自身意識，而由於人類中心知識霸權的長期佔據，我們早已失去了與環境的連結。隨著她在療癒這一主題上不斷深入，她愈發從亞洲哲學與各種「前現代」的身體觀中汲取反思。西方醫學實踐傾向於在局部區域尋找可見的病徵，也就是「患部」，作為診治的對象；而其他古老的實踐與宇宙觀則引導我們關注不可見的聯繫與流動，例如：「氣」——著眼於系統性成因而非僅僅是表層症狀。在傳統的韓醫與中醫取徑中，疾病源於氣的錯位或阻滯，亦源於連接內在臟腑與外部環境之系統間的失衡。而在其他原住民知識體系中，我們的身體是反映其他意識領域運動的媒介，演繹著不同的人與自然的關係。這一視角構成了她理解生態哀悼的方式：療癒並非對孤立創傷的解決，而是對人類與超越人類世界之間關係性連續性的修復。
在這種視野中，人與自然並無分野。療癒可以根植於對靈性聯繫的修復。譬如，我們可以練習引導氣的流動，使自身與自然的代謝節律相調和。將這些體悟回溯至自己的文化根源，崔榮淑開始在另類的領域中展開新的地理探索，並延伸至她所稱的「政治靈性」（political spirituality）這一潛意識或靈性層面。通過情動溝通與感官實踐的練習，她為理解與共情超越人類世界騰出空間，以整體性的視野描摹自然之身，揭露那些在表象之下運作的隱形系統與機制。因此，哀悼不再只是一種情緒，而是一段去學習（unlearning）的旅程，去重新認識我們與萬物更深層的共生聯繫。療癒，即是重新激活人類與超越人類之間斷裂的聯繫。
2023年，崔榮淑創辦《預兆》（Foreshadowing）作為一個過渡性的生態哀悼委員會，目的在於「通過關注那些已經離世、或即將離世之物，構建一種星球尺度的愛之教育學（planetary pedagogy of love），探索場域特定的、社群導向的、多物種的療癒方法。」[3] 《預兆》主持季節性的聚會，在他們稱為「後季節世界」（post-seasonal world）中提供各種儀式，將這些聚會視為知識生產的場域，亦可能如安清（Anna Tsing）所言，成為由關係性與「汙染」（contamination）所驅動的「偶發事件」（happenings）[4] 。2025年5月，《預兆》的啟動活動計畫以調茶與講故事的形式，在 Delfina 基金會與聖詹姆斯公園舉行，邀請參與者調配屬於自己的茶飲並分享各自的故事。通過這場集體的感官練習，以及參與者藉由各類植物材料激活的個人記憶，活動過程成為一個生成性的過程，勾勒出人類、植物、地方與更廣泛的系統性結構之間錯綜複雜的關係。從一杯揭示殖民歷史之多樣性與後果的調配茶中，人們得以追溯這些植物隨殖民擴張與貿易而遷徙的歷史，進而意識到「去殖民化」或許正是帝國自身內嵌的一種反諷屬性。
這提供了一個例證，說明儀式如何成為一種具身實踐，以及參與式藝術形式如何能夠成為社會與生態正義的媒介。在此，儀式的運作並非象徵性的姿態，而是一種知識生成的模式——感官經驗、記憶與關係在其中交匯。儘管這些跨文化的「療方」對於矯治意識形態偏見之實際療效尚未可知，但它們無疑提升了生態素養。我們由此得以讀出，我們的飲食文化如何隨著氣候變化的動態而進一步變化；與此同時，我們身體的內部空間也向來自不同產地的混合草本敞開，與不同的地理共同代謝。
值得注意的是，《預兆》這一共同體組織形式，本身正是崔榮淑藉以耕耘其「親密組織」的方式，作為氣候提問、跨物種團結的藝術語言基礎。通過搭建這一協作網絡，她創造出用以分享情感、情動與知識的季節與模式，這些又可被進一步「授粉」、「發酵」或「堆肥」——形成一種能夠提供反思性與批判性視角的生態系統。這一聚合體以各種儀式、學習小組與線上會議的形式，創造出多種共處的路徑。
為了拓展她的藝術研究與表達，崔榮淑選擇與超越人類的行動者共同工作，引領觀眾體驗與自然之間全新的關係與時間性。
在泰特現代美術館（Tate Modern），她於《銘記自然》（Remember Nature）2025年的計畫項目中呈現了直播表演《失落之書》（Book of Loss），以紀念近年來導致泰晤士河日益加劇的洪水威脅，背後所消逝的七座主要冰川。表演發生在一間展廳內，崔榮淑事先以紫外線墨水描繪出冰川的形狀，留待一支「搜尋隊」去探索發現。活動在夜晚舉行，彼時展廳一片漆黑，不對公眾開放，整個過程被設計為一場儀式：搜尋隊手持紫外燈在黑暗的展廳中探索，一旦發現某座冰川的痕跡，便會搖響鈴鐺召集全隊。隨後，崔榮淑會朗讀一段與洪水影響相關的故事，並寫下這座冰川的名字。
這場表演層層疊加著不同的情動張力——在黑暗中搜尋未知身體痕跡的行動、哀悼的聚集，以及最終的命名行為，這一行為強化了辨識的過程，使遙遠的氣候事件與身邊的現實產生關聯。通過這些不斷累積的、辨認隱匿冰川之軀的時刻，集體的情感變得親密而強烈，將參與者與泰特美術館外的河水，以及更遠處的北極海洋聯繫在一起。
在另一場近期的表演《呼吸的尺度——跨物種協作樂譜》（Scales of Breathing – Score for Interspecies Collaboration）中，該作品最初由首爾市立美術館委託製作，崔榮淑將我們帶入土壤的世界，去學習蚯蚓如何與微生物物種協作。她與 Sophie Seita、Rike Scheffler 共同呈現了這場互動式、沉浸式的表演，將其作為一種集體身體—空間的探索：一種學習跨物種溝通的方式。在她們的研究中，蚯蚓的滯育（diapause）與繁殖能力，以及它們在為所有物種創造宜居星球方面所作的貢獻，成為重要的靈感來源。包括達爾文在內的許多科學家都認為，蚯蚓是地球上最具影響力的生物。她們將這些生物學特徵編織進編舞設計之中，將這些認知轉譯為集體的感受與感知。參與者通過視覺與聲音，循著蚯蚓生命的四個階段展開體驗，同時獲得相應的材料與指引，以揭示自身內在的運動與聯結方式。
從這些項目中，我們可以觀察到崔榮淑始終如一地構築著各種時間性的聚會，通過具身的、以儀式為基礎的知識生產，培育生態素養。其中蘊含著一種深切的信念：身體是學習的場域、變革的能動力量，亦是社群的根基。在這些聚會中，崔榮淑不斷營造出自我邊界得以消融的時刻——真正的共在由此得以形成。當我們通過蚯蚓的運動學會與土壤連結，通過調配的茶學會與不同的文化地理連結，通過儀式學會與消逝的冰川連結，一種新的身體便通過協同作用浮現出來——這一身體既是對既有權力結構的抵抗與協商，也揭示出學習跨物種糾纏的全新路徑。
崔榮淑的實踐始於哀悼，卻並未止步於哀慟之中。在她對移民之死、負傷地景、原住民療癒實踐、植物、冰川、土壤與蚯蚓的種種探究中，哀悼成為一種感知那些常被傳統生態知識所忽視的關係實踐方式。由此浮現的，不僅僅是談論生態危機的另一套替代性詞彙，更是一種不同的認識論命題：要認識一個已然改變的地球，或許首先需要我們具備被它所觸動、所影響的能力。
正是在此，崔榮淑關於生態素養的構想顯現出其重要性。相較於以碳排放核算、量化與個體責任為核心的氣候素養模式，她所提出的，是感官的、具身的、集體的、關係性的認知方式。她的儀式並不僅僅要求參與者獲取關於生態失能的訊息；它們要求參與者棲居於時間之中，通過身體去記憶，跨越差異去傾聽，並去遭遇那些其時間性與感知方式超出人類經驗範疇的生命形式。調合茶方、消逝的冰川、蚯蚓的運動，與其說是知識的對象，不如說是知識得以以不同方式生成的契機。
這種哀悼與社會及生態正義的問題密不可分。她所追溯的種種喪失，皆與榨取、殖民主義及不平等的脆弱性等歷史相互糾纏。哀悼之所以具有政治性，恰恰在於它打破了「社會危機」與被歸入「環境損害」範疇之事物之間的分界。她的作品同樣並未將療癒設想為回歸至某個完整或和諧的世界；我們所回歸的世界，早已是被改變了的世界。療癒由此成為在不可逆轉的變化條件下，重新修復我們建立關係之能力的工作——通過聚會與儀式所開啟的臨時空間，個體身體的邊界得以變得可滲透，記憶、其他物種與歷史，得以進入共享的感知與轉化過程。
在此意義上，生態哀悼或許正是生態素養的起點。哀悼，是去認識到我們早已被捲入超出自身的種種關係之中；療癒，則是去學習如何以不同的方式棲居於這些關係。崔榮淑的作品要求我們的，並不僅僅是去了解更多關於生態危機的知識，而是去成為不同類型的認知者：更具滲透性、更為專注、也更有能力「與之共在」（being-with）。她的實踐最終提供的，是一種面向已然改變的地球的教育學——在這種學習中，認識世界並非終點，學習如何歸屬於這個世界，才是學習的起點。
[1] 阿爾布雷希特．格倫（Glenn A. Albrecht）。《大地情感：新世界的新詞彙》（Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World）。康奈爾大學出版社，2019年。
[2] 本文寫作內容主要採自於2026年3月3日筆者與藝術家所進行的訪談。
[3] 引自該團體官網：https://foreshadowing.net/
[4] 羅安清著，謝孟璇譯。《末日松茸：資本主義廢墟世界中的生活可能》。八旗文化，2018年。
“Solastalgia is the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault.” — Glenn Albrecht [1] Earth Emotions, 2019
I met Youngsook during the Estuary Festival in the summer of 2025. Facing the open Thames estuary, participants listened through wireless headphones to a story narrated by cockles and the sea, moving across the landscape as a temporary flock. In Submarine Consciousness, Or What Have You, a collaboration between Youngsook Choi and Taey Iohe, ecological history unfolds through sound, movement, and attention. As we walked, drifting between the narration, the heated air flow, the moving landscape, and the distant roaming of fighter jets, I found it difficult to focus on any single layer. Yet this dispersal of attention gradually attuned my body to the environment. My body felt soft and saline—as if a small part of me had dissolved into the estuary. In that collective duration, I sensed what Glenn Albrecht calls “solastalgia”: not only as loss, but as a shared condition felt with the more-than-human world.
Since 2020, Youngsook has developed ecological grief as the central axis of her practice. [2] It stems from a deep recognition that the social-political system is not catching up with the changes to the altered Earth system, and that anticipatory grief is something we all now live with for good. She reframes ecological knowledge through grief, embodiment, and relationality, resisting the dominant data-driven and human-centered approaches to the climate crisis. While anthropocentric systems continue to destabilize ecological balance, the prevailing emphasis on carbon literacy—measured through quantifiable metrics and individual responsibility—produces a further abstraction from the lived realities of ecological loss. It creates the illusion of control while obscuring the entangled suffering of human and more-than-human worlds.
Through field research across the UK and Southeast Asia, including sites marked by ecological degradation and displacement, Youngsook traces how ecological grief emerges from interconnected systems of capitalist extraction and neo-colonial violence. Her work mobilizes grief not as a passive response, but as a political and sensory method for mapping these structures. In doing so, her practice resonates with ecofeminist approaches, particularly in its emphasis on embodied knowledge, relational care, and collective processes of healing. This article examines how her concept of “ecological literacy” unfolds through participatory rituals and interspecies encounters, generating new forms of knowledge grounded in affect, embodiment, and relation.
Healing Bodies without Borders
There has been a long research process and journey in Youngsook’s artistic inquiries. The turning point that shaped her practice, however, came from a tragic cause: the Essex 39 incident (39 Vietnamese migrants found dead in a lorry container) in 2019 taught her to read the injustice and inequality embedded in transnational power structures interlocking with neoliberalism, neocolonial practices, and hidden climate injustice, among others. She developed the commemorative performance project Not This Future during the pandemic as a ritual to respond to the incident. People responded to her online invitation with self-directed memorial rituals via video, and this experience led her to further investigate the power of collective grieving and healing.
When Youngsook was later working on a site-specific project in St. Helens in 2020, she found herself facing a post-mining site where the land refused to reproduce at all. In her eyes, this land seemed to be in such deep grief that it could not, or would not, grow anything. That striking realization, together with the bare landscape, left a deep impression on her, and her concept of ecological grief embarked on a journey to expose the history and systemic violence around that site, while contemplating the solace and transformative healing efforts that might follow.
In another research trip to Malaysia, she encountered sewang, a traditional healing ritual from local indigenous communities. Dreams are portals for collective or community healing: participants use dreams as a way of mapping ecological landmarks and reorienting their relationships, receiving consciousness beyond personal perception and language. This practice and philosophy gave Youngsook new inspiration as she reflected on how our eco-literacy is often limited by our language capacity and our own consciousness, and on how we have lost connection to the environment through the pre-occupation of human-centered knowledge hegemony. The further she delves into the subject of healing, the more she draws on holistic healing approaches from Asian philosophies and various “pre-modern” understandings of the body. Where Western medical practice tends to look for visible evidence in localized areas for treatment, other ancient practices and cosmologies direct us toward invisible connection and movement, such as qi, attending to systemic causes rather than surface symptoms alone. In traditional Korean and Chinese medical approaches, illness results from displaced or clogged qi, as well as from imbalances in the systems connecting internal body parts to the responding external environment. In other indigenous knowledge systems, our bodies are mediums reflecting movements from other conscious spheres, animating different human-nature relations. This perspective informs her approach to ecological grief: healing is not the resolution of isolated damage, but the restoration of relational continuity between human and more-than-human worlds.
In this view, human and nature have no separation. Healing can be rooted in restoring spiritual connections. For instance, we can learn to exercise the flow of qi to attune ourselves to the metabolic patterns of nature. Threading these learnings back to her cultural roots, Youngsook began developing new geographical explorations in alternative domains, extending also into the subconscious or spiritual level she calls “political spirituality.” Through exercises in affective communication and sensory practice, she holds space for understanding and sympathy toward more-than-humans, contouring the bodies of nature with holistic views to expose the invisible systems and mechanics working behind the surface. Grief, therefore, is no longer a mere emotion, but an unlearning journey toward recognizing our deeper symbiotic connections. Healing is the work of reviving the broken connections between humans and more-than-humans.
Ritual as Knowledge Production and Social Justice
In 2023, Youngsook founded Foreshadowing as a transitional ecological grief council to “build a planetary pedagogy of love by addressing those who are no longer with us or won’t be soon, exploring site-specific, community-oriented, multi-species healing methods.” [3] Foreshadowing hosts seasonal gatherings as offerings to what they call the post-seasonal world, treating these gatherings as sites of knowledge production that might also become “happenings,” as Anna Tsing describes them—driven by relationality and contamination. [4] The launch event of Foreshadowing was held at the Delfina Foundation and St James’s Park in May 2025, was a full-day convivial gathering that included experimentation with tea blends as a form of collective story-telling. They invited participants to make their own tea blends and share their stories. Through this collective sensory exercise and the activation of participants' personal memories with various vegetal materials, the event became a generative process of mapping the complex relations among humans, plants, places, and broader systemic structures. From a cup of blended tea that reveals the diversity and consequences of colonial history, one could trace the plants' migration histories alongside colonial expansion and trade, realizing how decolonization is perhaps an ironic, embedded attribute of empire itself.
This offers an example of how ritual can become an embodied practice, and how participatory art forms can serve as a medium for social and ecological justice. Here, ritual operates not as symbolic gesture, but as a mode of knowledge generation—where sensory experience, memory, and relation converge. Even though the effectiveness of these multicultural remedies for curing ideological prejudice remains unknown, they certainly boost eco-literacy. We could read how our food culture is further shaped by the dynamics of climate change. At the same time, the internal space of our bodies is opened to mixed herbs of various origins, metabolizing together with different geographies.
It is worth noting that Foreshadowing’s communal structure is itself the form through which Youngsook cultivates her “intimate organising” as the foundation of artistic languages for climate interrogation and interspecies solidarity. By facilitating this collaborative network, she recreates seasons and patterns for sharing sentiments, affections, and knowledge that can be further pollinated, fermented, or composted—an ecology that offers reflexive and critical perspectives. The gathering takes the form of various rituals, study groups, and online meetings, creating different paths of being together.
Interspecies Epistemology
To extend her artistic research and expression, Youngsook works with more-than-human actors, leading her audience to experience new relations and temporalities with nature.
At Tate Modern, she staged the live-streamed performance Book of Loss as part of Remember Nature 2025, commemorating the seven major glaciers lost in recent years in relation to the increasing threat of flooding along the Thames. The performance took place in a gallery where Youngsook had pre-drawn the shapes of glaciers in UV ink, left to be discovered by a search party. The event took place in the evening, when the galleries were dark and closed to the public, and was designed as a ritualistic process: the search party explored the dark gallery with UV torches, and once a glacier was found, a bell would ring to gather the team. Youngsook would then read a story related to the flooding’s impacts and write down the name of the glacier.
The performance was layered with different affective tensions: the act of searching for unknown body-tracings in the dark, the gathering of grief, and finally, the naming action, which enhanced a process of recognition that made the distant climate event relatable to the neighboring reality. Through these accumulated moments of identifying the hidden glacier bodies, the collective emotion was intimate and intense, tying participants to the river water just outside the Tate and to the Arctic Ocean beyond.
In another recent performance, Scales of Breathing – Score for Interspecies Collaboration, first commissioned by the Seoul Museum of Art, Youngsook brought us into the world of soil to learn from the ways earthworms collaborate with microbial species. Together with Sophie Seita and Rike Scheffler, she presented this interactive, immersive performance as a collective body-space exploration—a way of learning interspecies communication. Their research drew inspiration from earthworms’ capacities for diapause and reproduction, and their role in creating a habitable planet for all species; many scientists, including Darwin, consider the earthworm the most influential creature on Earth. They interwove these biological features into their choreographic design, translating these findings into a collective feeling and sensing process. Participants followed four stages of the earthworm's life through visuals and sounds, while receiving materials and instructions to uncover their own inner movements and ways of connecting.
Across these projects, we can observe how Youngsook has persistently formulated temporal gatherings that foster ecological literacy through embodied, ritual-based knowledge production. Underlying them is a deep belief that the body is the site of learning, the agency for change, and the base of community. In these gatherings, Youngsook crafts moments in which the boundaries of the self dissolve—true togetherness taking form. As we learn to connect with the soil through earthworm movements, with different cultural geographies through blended tea, and with disappeared glaciers through ritual, a new kind of body emerges through synergy—one that functions as resistance and negotiation with existing power structures, revealing new paths for learning interspecies entanglement.
Learning to Grieve, Learning to Relate
Youngsook Choi’s practice begins with grief, but does not remain within mourning. Across her investigations into migrant deaths, damaged landscapes, indigenous healing practices, plants, glaciers, soil, and earthworms, grief becomes a way of sensing the relations that conventional ecological knowledge tends to render invisible. What emerges is not simply an alternative vocabulary for talking about ecological crises, but a different epistemological proposition: that to know an altered Earth may require us first to become capable of being affected by it.
This is where Youngsook’s notion of ecological literacy becomes significant: against a model of climate literacy centered on carbon accounting and individual responsibility, she proposes forms of knowing that are sensory, embodied, collective, and relational. Her rituals do not ask participants merely to acquire information about ecological loss; they ask them to inhabit duration, remember through the body, and encounter forms of life whose temporalities exceed human experience. The blended tea, the disappeared glacier, and the movements of earthworms become less objects of knowledge than occasions through which knowledge is generated differently.
This grief is inseparable from questions of social and ecological justice. The losses she traces—migrant deaths, exhausted landscapes, disappearing glaciers, displaced plants, damaged ecosystems—are entangled with histories of extraction, colonialism, and unequal vulnerability. Grief becomes political precisely because it interrupts the separation between what counts as a social crisis and what is relegated to environmental damage. Nor does her work propose healing as a return to an intact or harmonious world; the world to which we return is already altered. Healing becomes instead the work of restoring our capacity for relation within conditions of irreversible change—temporary spaces, opened through gathering and ritual, in which the boundaries of the individual body grow porous, and memory, other species, and history can enter shared processes of sensing and transformation.
Ecological grief, in this sense, may be the beginning of ecological literacy. To grieve is to recognize that we are already implicated in relations that exceed us; to heal is to learn how to inhabit those relations differently. What Youngsook’s practice ultimately offers is a pedagogy for an altered Earth—one in which learning does not end with understanding the world, but begins with learning how to belong to it.
[1] Albrecht, Glenn A. Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Cornell University Press, 2019.
[2] This article is written based on an interview conducted on 3 March 2026.
[3] From the collective's website: https://foreshadowing.net/
[4] Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2015.
%2520(1).jpg%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3D508b1734-0b04-45ca-bcea-cc46fc88259f&w=3840&q=75)