COMPOS(T)ING GRIEF: A REGENERATIVE ECO-RITUAL LED BY SOIL

Compos(t)ing grief was be a workshop created for the University of Melbourne’s Creativity and Community Resilience Studio. Assisting with their exploration the uncertainties of local futures, this workshop centered the cycles of rot and renewal demonstrated by soil systems, to consider the relationship between the grief of climate uncertainty and its role in helping to visualise possible futures.

Across the day, participants used conversational prompts and personal reflective exercises to build the foundations for a unique group ritual, intended to both acknowledge the volume of eco-grief surrounding local ecological precarity, and to offer it into the regenerative worlds of compost, so it might make good soil from which to grow a flourishing future.

Alongside food scraps, seeds, egg shells and leaf litter form their own gardens, participants layered the materials, words and experiences generated in the workshop together to create a new compost system for the Art & Ecology studio at the Dookie Campus. Engaging ritual as a process of meaning making and intention outside of belief systems, the workshop concluded with an offering of the participants ‘tears’, water poured over the compost components to support its internal processes, and commence its process of change and transformation.

The Creativity & Community Resilience Studio aims to support co-created community adaptation to climate change by establishing a Creativity and Community Resilience Studio at Dookie campus, the home of the Victoria Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub. In partnership with Melbourne Climate Futures at the University of Melbourne and the federally-funded Victoria Drought Hub, this project will situate creative-led strategies and arts practices at the centre of efforts to strengthen community resilience in the face of future climatic change.