Solastalgia (2017)
Photo by Astra Brinkmann for swissnex San Francisco.
Solastalgia was a work I conceived of as part of an exhibition at swissnex San Francisco, Climate Garden 2085.
The exhibition focus is on a contemplation of climate change through what the art/scicomm lead behind it, Juanita Schläpfer-Miller, calls the "slow medium" of plants. More specifically: two greenhouses full of them, each set to a different climate. One reflects a temperature model based on the Paris Agreement, one is set to a temperature model where people don't do anything at all.
We also put together a personal darling project of mine focused on Solastalgia. I wrote a longer piece on the topic, "Home is Leaving: The Emotions of Climate Change.” The installation at swissnex was an attempt at driving conversation in the space. It has a beautiful cedar log provided by Upscale Arborists and a simple app designed by Olivier Chételat, which was installed by Kent Long.
It's designed to define a word: solastalgia, from solacium (pain) and -algia, (home). Essentially, if nostalgia is the pain of leaving home, solastalgia is the pain of a home that leaves you. It's a term that's emerged in ecopsychology to define the anxieties, sadness and disorientation of losing a sense of permanence in nature.
“What will you miss about your natural world?”
The concept is the question: What will you miss about your natural world? And we started the prompt with "I remember..." The Tweet-sized responses are collected, edited, and projected on the gallery wall for 20 seconds on a loop, interspersed with the "solastalgia" definition.
A visitor interacts with the solastalgia piece at swissnex San Francisco. Photo by Astra Brinkmann.
In a science communications setting, inspiring actual interaction is a challenge. But people did contribute! The question seemed to capture a lot of people's imaginations.
The concept was a solution to three basic challenges:
How do we get strangers to talk to one another?
How could we confront emotions of climate change without creating a "doomsday" sense of resignation around the topic?
How do we inspire a personal stake in the impacts of climate change?
Solastalgia install. Photo by Astra Brinkmann for swissnex San Francisco.
I think it worked because it identified a new and pretty raw emotion. Asking people to share stories of positive memories in nature, and changes they've seen in their local climate, shifts perspectives away from global, planet-sized catastrophes to something manageable and actionable. Stories are emotional, more visceral than data. It's possible to process that experience through this new, named, emotional vocabulary. It also gave strangers an easy story to tell one another, hopefully sparking some new friendships and connections.
Climate Change narratives can seem so big that they become incomprehensible, turned needlessly abstract through data. By asking people to share stories we remind people that this is tangible, and we give them space to process what it feels like in a private, small way. The data is there if they need it, but they need to feel their way there.
The concept was later adapted for an exhibit at the Presidio National Park in San Francisco.