Caitlin Mary Margarett Sørensdatter

The Fruits (Solastalgia in Skønvirke)

The Fruits (Solastalgia in Skønvirke) will be a multi-sensorial project which hosts an apophatic, autotheoretical, and autofictional edifice for solastalgia’s longing, trauma, and hope in the face of climate disruption. The project will exhibit the visual and literary connectivity of solastalgia’s apparitions amidst climate dread, cultural amnesia, ambient and overt anxieties, queer experience as it abuts Christian existentialism, and the interstitial nature of performance and craft practices. The visual dimensions of this project will be supported by an epistolary, benediction-driven segment that draws on Kierkegaard’s 1849 work The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, and is reminiscent of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.

The project will operate as a triad: ceramics installation, film, and epistles. Housed within the aesthetics and politics of the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements, this is a continuation of work from my previous immersive theater work. My utilitarian-based objects, the film, and the epistles will serve as substrates for discussing the hyper-industrialized disruptions of today.

The ceramics-centered installation will present materiality as an edifice for performative knowledge-making in a domestic site that often transverses into the public sphere: the dinner table. The film will situate anthropogenic disturbance through manufactured vignettes of an almost folkloric domestic sphere in an unspecified ‘past’ that troubles narratives of ‘progress.’ These scenes will further dislodge and reveal the ambient anxieties which impinge public discourse on sexuality, ecological rights, and material life. The epistles, addressed to an unknowable interlocutor, will beg questions and provide autotheoretical and autofictional responses to letters the audience is never privy to. These epistles will report climate happenings and the somatic affect garnered by climate disaster’s social constrictions. Each epistle ends with a benediction for a world that is slowly, achingly becoming while reckoning with extinction cascades.