Fire, Dust, and the Resurrective Commons: Toward a Ceremony for an Unsettled Earth

What might resurrection mean when death assumes planetary dimensions? How does one mourn the unidentifiable dead whose ashes mingle with volcanic ash, toxic dust, and the unsettled earth? As the whole Earth threatens to become a cemetery in the present planetary crisis, is there still a ceremony to be found that might gather a resurrective commons while refusing any reconciliation with history’s unequally distributed violence?

Fire, Dust, and the Resurrective Commons: Toward a Ceremony for an Unsettled Earth is a collective lecture-performance in which philosophy, anthropology, and the performing arts are assembled into a shared dramaturgical inquiry. Through words, images, sound, and embodied actions, the work seeks forms of attending to the dead and caring for a volatile, poisoned planet.

The lecture-performance emerges from a process of collective research developed in the months preceding the event and rehearsed during an intensive residency in New Haven. It moves between the human body and the body of the earth, scientific prediction and divination, forensic identification and the naming of the dead, mourning and resurrection. Flickering scenes from anthropologist Jasmine Pisapia’s ethnographies of southern Italian toxic burial grounds meet Piersandra Di Matteo’s dramaturgical work for Romeo Castellucci’s staging of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection.” The unsettled earth opens onto the realm of the dead, creating the scene where material evidence and otherworldly haunting are entangled. The image becomes here a dramaturgical force, a threshold through which the absent may return while remaining irreducibly absent.

Guided by Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s insistence that “the ceremony must be found,” this experimental work places the idea of ceremony in dialogue with Nikolai Fedorov’s nineteenth-century cosmist vision of resurrection as a “common task”: a material and collective practice of reconstituting life and transforming science, art, and everyday existence. Drawing on philosophers Kirill Chepurin and Alex Dubilet’s Fedorovian formulation of a “resurrective commons,” it asks how the living might rebuild their relations with damaged environments and the disappearing traces of the dead.

Free and open to the public.

Convened by Jasmine C. Pisapia with Piersandra Di Matteo and others.

Sponsored by the Institute of Sacred Music’s Religion, Ecology, and Expressive Culture Initiative.

Contact: Katya Vetrov